Idris Elba and Kate Winslet just want to get home. She has to get to her wedding the next day in New York, while he has to operate on a patient in Baltimore. However, they’re stuck at an airport in Idaho, where a snowstorm has grounded all commercial flights. Desperate to get out of there, he agrees to go along with her in chartering a private plane to Denver, where they might be able to catch another flight east.
Unfortunately, the charter pilot, Beau Bridges, has a stroke in mid-air and the plane crashes in the snow-covered Rockies. He’s dead, leaving only Kate, Idris, and Beau’s dog to survive and find a way to civilization. Fortunately, Idris is a surgeon, so he can take care of both Kate and the dog when they are wounded. She’s a photojournalist, so she can, um, let’s just say she’s up for an adventure. As for the dog, well, you don’t think the filmmakers are going to let a dog die on a mountain, do you?
The scenery is beautiful — kudos to the location scouts who found the untouched wilderness where the movie was shot — but Idris and Kate don’t have much chemistry, an essential element in what is basically a two-hander story of love and survival. Worse, nothing happens in “The Mountain Between Us” that you won’t see coming a mile away, even without one of Kate’s telephoto lenses.
I give “The Mountain Between Us” a 4 out of 10.