September 28, 1997 -- "The Edge" could be described as the camping trip from Hell. First of all, you've got no stove, no food, no tent, no sleeping bags, no map, no compass, and there's Bart the Bear following you around, trying to eat you.

Wait, that's not the bad part, not really. The really bad thing is that you are not alone on this trip. There's a companion, a know-it-all who insists on telling you everything he knows about wilderness survival, and he knows enough to keep talking and talking for days and days. It's enough to drive one to murder. When the gun finally gets loaded and cocked, it is no surprise.

Anthony Hopkins stars as Charles Morse, a billionaire bookworm know-it-all who goes with his wife on a photo shoot in Alaska. His wife, Mickey, is a model, played by Elle Macpherson, not much of a stretch there. The guy in charge of the photo shoot is Robert Green (Alec Baldwin) and the photographer, Stephen, is played by Harold Perrineau.

Morse, Green and Stephen all get stranded together in the wilderness when their plane crashes. As mentioned above, all three get on each other's nerves. There's also a romantic triangle and a murder plot, along with the Grizzly Adams stuff.

Hopkins and Baldwin do some very fine acting in this film, but Baldwin has the better part. He does the most with it, running the gamut from laughter to emotional collapse and murderous conviction. It is really an excellent performance. The relationship between the two men is explored in some depth and the film concludes in an interesting way. The scenery is beautiful and the wilderness sequences are generally well-photographed.

The problem I have with the film is that it just seemed, like so many films of this type, to be too long and boring. Like "Sleuth" and "My Dinner with Andre" it doesn't matter how talented the actors are, or how well the screenplay is written, when you've only got two characters to work with, the story gets stale before too long. This film rates a C.

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Copyright © 1997 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.