Anthony Hopkins stars as Charles, a reserved billionaire with a quick mind and a great command of useful facts. On a weekend excursion to the mountains with his supermodel wife (Elle MacPherson) and her entourage of photographers and colleagues, Charles gets roped into a jaunt to a remote hunting cabin. The seaplane that carries the errand boys flies into a flock of migrating geese, and it crashes into the lake below. The only survivors are Charles, a photographer named Bob (Alec Baldwin), and Bob's assistant Stephen (Harold Perrineau). The trio pull themselves to shore, but they question their chances of survival in the middle of nowhere with no supplies and little hope of rescue.

The fun of The Edge comes from watching Charles think his way out of the predicament. So many movies these days aren't quite up to the cleverness of their premises; films as big as The Game and as shoestring as Dream With the Fishes are united by their stiltedness--their melodies are too complicated for their composers to play. The Edge, like the recently released L.A. Confidential, constantly surprises us with its imagination. Early on, Charles points out that people lost in the wild tend to die of shame, because they do not stop and think. To The Edge's credit, it makes these thought processes exciting to watch.

For this, the praise mainly belongs to Hopkins, who delivers Mamet's punchy dialogue with amusing contemplation, oblivious to how irrationally rational he sounds. While others about him are losing their heads, Charles is calmly explaining how to start a fire with carved ice. Credit also goes to Mamet's careful plotting, which is almost cruel in its contrivances. For all of Charles' ingenuity--his experiments with makeshift compasses and deadfall animal traps--he can't quite plan around the vicissitudes of nature. He's hampered by the unreliability of his fellow castaways (especially Bob, who may have had an affair with Charles' wife) and by the appetite of a man-eating Kodiak bear. At every turn, no matter how well-prepared he is, Charles' life is in danger.

The Edge's weakness is that it gets hooked on the danger--the bear and the betrayals. The film consists of one crisis after another, until it becomes all about the crises and not enough about the characters. Tamahori keeps the action tight and thrilling, and Mamet's dialogue is typically brittle, but the script lacks scope. We know these men only when they're in trouble, and we have hints about who they are in the real world, but ultimately we have no stake in the ways their wilderness experience changes them. We're wrapped up in the perils of the moment, but we don't especially care about how things turn out.