The Himalayas is inspired by true events. In 2000, South Korean mountaineer Um Hong-gil (Hwang Jung-min) is just two peaks away from being the first Asian to climb the fourteen highest peaks in the world. That's when the very determined Park Mootaek (Jung Woo) becomes part of his team. In spite of Um's resistance to the young man, Mootaek becomes his closest student. Years later, Mootaek dies on an Everest expedition. Um has already been forced to give up mountaineering because of a leg injury, but he decides to risk one last climb to recover the body of his friend.
This is a movie that wants to be everything to everyone. It is the story of a real life tragedy, and so it definitely needed to be a drama on some level. But for a good long while, the movie is also a comedy. In the early going, the film makes mountaineering out to much less serious than it probably is. It plays like a buddy comedy, with the young, overly enthusiastic Park Mootaek trying to win over the grizzled veteran Um Hong-gil. Mootaek and his fellow junior mountaineer are made to comedically suffer in order to earn their place on the team.
This detour into comedy keeps the film from really focusing on the meat of its story. It spends entirely too much time in these early portions, undermining the severity of the events to follow. There is a general lack of focus in this movie, the story tackling too large a span of time. It isn’t able to linger in moments of grace, the film always mindful of the next big emotion. It turns these real life events into enervating melodrama, the whole thing becoming mediocre as it attempts to evoke every last possible feeling from the audience.
The film might be best as a survival tale. The most compelling moments involves the danger that these characters face when scaling these peaks. It fully captures the harshness of the conditions, and depicts instances where the climbers are facing imminent danger. The film is much more difficult to swallow outside of these scenes. The writing is all over the place, unable to concentrate on any single theme as it drifts through this large span of time. Characters are underdeveloped, and themes never fully emerge. The movie, in spite of spending so much time off mountains, doesn’t really get to the bottom of who these people are.
The film seems to try to make up for the lack of sophistication in the writing but just turning everything up to eleven. There are a lot of tears of this movie, little of it particularly convincing. It all feels overdone, the movie generally forcing emotion through volume and quantity of it. Some of the blame has to go to the cast, who really lay it on thick. Hwang Jung-min is an actor skilled in portraying the everyman. This film casts him as a larger-than-life figure driven by arcane motivations that the actor can’t quite portray. Jung Woo plays everything broad, the actor playing the character’s affable enthusiasm with disconcerting mania.
The Himalayas is trying to be too many things. The movie doesn’t hold together, its separate pieces struggling to form a cohesive whole. It never gains any real momentum, the movie losing its speed as it shifts from one big emotion to the next. It never gets to be truly funny, or truly exciting, or truly moving. It ends up being pretty mediocre at all these things. It probably would have been better to just pick one thing and really go with it.
My Rating:
