'Everest' review: Deadly ascent has peak thrills with Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin, Jason Clarke and Keira Knightley

Like the mountain for which it's named, "Everest" is rock solid. It's big, it's beautiful, it's terrifying, and it's merciless to both its characters and the audience.

Based on a real 1996 expedition that claimed eight lives, Baltasar Kormakur's film spends its first hour making a trip up the tallest mountain on Earth look like the adventure of a lifetime. It then spends its second hour convincing audiences to stay home and play checkers. No kidding: There are shots here so convincing that you'll feel like you have frostbite.


Jason Clarke stars as Rob Hall, an expert mountaineer leading a new batch of adventure tourists up the world's highest peak — and a deadly storm shows up at the worst possible moment.

With their oxygen tanks empty, the exhausted climbers must retreat down the already deadly mountain in whiteout conditions. As you watch, you are reminded of the movie poster's advisory: "Human beings were not meant to survive at the cruising altitude of a 747."

As individuals fall victim to the elements, the climbers must make a choice: Do they hunker down and try to survive or risk death to save others? Not everyone gets out alive.

The actors playing Hall's customers and colleagues — including an eccentric Jake Gyllenhaal, a cocky Josh Brolin, a gentle John Hawkes and the usually blank Sam Worthington — all get a chance to try out their best "freezing to death" faces. The ladies in the cast, unfortunately, have less to do, with wives and girlfriends Keira Knightley, Emily Watson and Robin Wright spending the bulk of their screen time looking worried while standing next to telephones.

Kormakur ("Contraband," "2 Guns") takes his time getting to the tragedy and chaos. It's only after the characters have been thoroughly briefed on the details of scaling a 29,029-foot mountain that things start to go wrong. This slow-burn approach works wonders for tension — you don't notice just how badly the situation has unraveled until it's too late.

The film is so harrowing that it's easy to overlook its transgressions: With a cast this big, only a handful of performances are allowed to truly blossom. And the brutal deaths of certain characters will have audiences wondering, "Wait, who was that guy again?"

The good news is the film is intense enough to numb the entire body. The bad news is that it's not emotionally deep enough to freeze the heart.

But it earns its fourth star because it's so harrowing and intense. At the end of the day, "Everest" is an old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes cinematic adventure, aided and abetted by the best CGI money can buy. Make sure to bring a jacket.