Venice Review: 'Everest' Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin, Robin Wright, Sam Worthington, Keira Knightley, Jason Clarke, More

"Because it's there" is famously a good enough reason to climb Everest, and it's probably also as much justification as was needed to greenlight an expensive and starry 3D/IMAX 3D film about Everest too. After all, who doesn't thrill to vertiginous helicopter shots of icy slopes, who doesn't love queasy 3D sequences where we swoop over and under spindly ladder bridges, who doesn't appreciate the spectacle value of a roiling storm that blots out the blue sky with the force and speed of a megaton bomb? The mountain summons such imagery immediately and has a hold on the collective imagination, just by being there, that makes the whole project feel like a no-brainer. And on those visceral levels, Baltasar Kormákur's "Everest" certainly delivers. But as a functional adventure-cum-disaster flick it works hard not to let the grandeur of its setting become obscured by anything as extraneous as plot or human connection: "Everest" boasts drama so high it's...