Snow Job in a Dry T Shirt

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TITLE: CLIFFHANGER

DIRECTOR: RENNY HARLIN

WRITERS: MICHAEL FRANCE AND SYLVESTER STALLONE

THE BOTTOM LINE: A scary no-brainer gets the summer movie season off on its customary note.

You worry about Sylvester Stallone. For most of Cliffhanger he runs around in a T shirt atop a mountain range in the snow. The absence of parka and mittens is, of course, dictated by the desire to show off his huge, ever straining biceps. Still, you hate to see a guy risking pneumonia for his art, so it's a relief when, a couple of shots after he has fought a subsidiary bad guy in an icy tarn, his shirt is shown to be miraculously dry.

But we are not at Cliffhanger for realism; we're there for the cliffhanging, and there's plenty of it. What gets Stallone up on the rocks is a rescue call from a downed private jet whose passengers are a vicious gang of thieves led by John Lithgow. They've just screwed up the hijacking of another plane carrying $100 million in thousand-dollar bills, which are now scattered all over the dangerous landscape. So Sly and his friends have to worry about psychotically wielded weapons as well as their foot- and handholds. This makes for reasonably good fun. Director Harlin's only large mistake is staging the several violent deaths too authentically. They momentarily mar the high-speed implausibility of a movie that, like his Die Hard 2, agreeably combines the edgy and the genial.