09/26/97
MOVIE REVIEW: The Edge
Call of the wild testosterone

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

***1/2 (out of five)
Starring Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, Elle Macpherson, Harold Perrineau, L.Q. Jones. A 20th Century Fox picture written by David Mamet, directed by Lee Tamahori. Rated R, contains violence, profanity, adult themes. Running time: 120 minutes.

Anthony Hopkins probably isn't the first person you'd think of to lead you out of the Alaskan wilderness.

But that's the point of The Edge, in which Hopkins, playing a surprisingly squirrelly billionaire, gets stranded way out of his element in a remote region of Alaska (actually the Rockies of Alberta, Canada) alongside a hot-shot fashion photographer and his assistant.

Then again, you probably wouldn't choose David Mamet, author of such gritty urban stories as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, to write this tale either.

Nevertheless, The Edge is a powerful and very good lost-in-the-wilderness yarn, complete with hungry man-eating bear to run from and raging whitewater rapids to cross.

But really, save for a neat twist in the plot, there's nothing much to distinguish The Edge from a lot of other wilderness films that have been released in the past few years, most of which have had children at their core. There's even the familiar scene of a rescue helicopter that flies overhead but doesn't see the lost men who are frantically waving at it.

You won't find much of Mamet's scowling, hard-edged dialogue in The Edge, which leaves the impression that Mamet, who often probes the tortured souls of his tortured characters, wrote this one on holiday.

Nevertheless, there's plenty of testosterone flung about here, especially with that grizzly bear (Bart the Bear, who'd previously played opposite Hopkins in Legends of the Fall) forever hanging around the fringes and coming back for more again and again, each time hungrier and meaner than the last.

Despite the tension of that grisly situation, plus the tension between Hopkins's Charles Morris and Alec Baldwin's city-bred photog Robert Green, who Charles fears is trying to steal his trophy wife (a radiant Elle Macpherson), the greatest tension is created in an early scene when we suspect that a bear may be waiting in the dark shadows of a lodge kitchen where Charles has gone to make a late-night sandwich. Now that sequence is truly scary.

Charles also has lots of amusing moments along the wilderness trail as he Boy Scoutishly delivers sage survival lore to his startled companions, plucked from a book called Lost in the Wild.

"Find a round stone and spit under it," Charles tells a man suffering cramps.

Another time he asks cheerfully, "Did you know that you can make fire from ice?"

Later, with the aplomb of Daniel Boone, he declares, "You know, you can season meat with gunpowder." He drops that one shortly after making a compass from a paper clip placed on a leaf in a cupful of water.

The Edge contains the neatest stuff this side of Boys Life magazine.

Hopkins plays it very cool and close to the vest, although Mamet rather heavyhandedly sets us up for the mano-a-mano focus of the story right off the bat. Yet there are so many adventures in between that by the time you arrive at the point where the other shoe will drop, you've all but forgotten it.

If Hopkins is the definition of grace under pressure -- "People die in the woods of shame because they're not clever enough to survive," Charles intones solemnly at one point -- Baldwin's Bob Green is abrasive, hot-headed and panicky. It takes a while to figure out his true colors, though.

Director Lee Tamahori underlines the colorful adventures. He has staged a spectacular airplane crash in which you actually feel a part of the horrifying action, as well as more than one terrifying attack by the bear. Crashing through trees in hot pursuit, all teeth and fur, this is one scary sight.