ALSO SHOWING

The Mountain Between Us Cert: 12A. Now showing.

If you’ve ever pondered what would happen if you plonked two beautiful people on a mountain with nothing but a bag of nuts and aching hearts, ponder no more.

Dutch-Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad arrived in Hollywood via a series of energetic, sensitive releases that often involved human stories from his fraught homeland. The Mountain Between Us ,an adaptation of the US romance novel by Charles Martin, seems whimsical by comparison.

Kate Winslet is gutsy photojournalist Alex Martin. Idris Elba is neurosurgeon Ben Bass. A storm grounds their flight and they decide to charter a small plane to get them home. Smeared across the pilot’s face is the gormless grin of Beau Bridges — and immediately you know that things are about to go very wrong for the pair.

The plane goes down on an icy mountaintop in deepest darkest Utah. The pilot’s dog is unscathed, but Alex and Ben have sustained injuries (Ben is a doctor so it could be worse). Help doesn’t come, so they set off into the frozen wilderness where, naturally, they fall in love and get busy in an old musty cabin.

Elba and Winslet have little to work with in this handsome but ultimately dull and dissatisfying trudge through sentiment. The only significant moral to be gleaned from it all is that if Beau Bridges jingles the plane keys and says, “I’ll fly”, you take the train.