Kate’s shaggy dog tale will leave you cold

The Mountain Between Us (12A) Verdict: Silly romantic thriller

KATE WINSLET and Idris Elba can’t be short of offers, so heaven knows what either of them saw in this project, a very silly story which illadvisedly attempts to fuse smouldering romance with survivalist thrills amid the remote peaks of Utah.

Oh, and there’s a lovable dog, too, a golden retriever which miraculously survives a plane crash, an attack by a cougar and weeks of starvation to be just as waggy-tailed at the end of the film as he is at the beginning.

Winslet plays a fearless American photo-journalist called Alex who at the start of the film is in Salt Lake City trying, in the depths of winter, to get back to New York, where she is due to get married the following day.

If that doesn’t sound quite enough like the plot of a trashy novel then consider this: Elba is a gorgeous British neurosurgeon called Ben (with a tragic personal life) who also needs to get back to the East Coast, in his case to operate on a dying child.

When their flight is cancelled they team up to charter a tiny plane with a worryingly ageing pilot called Walter (Beau Bridges). The plane duly crashes on a mountain, killing Walter, but leaving Ben and Alex in only relatively minor states of disrepair. Walter’s dog is entirely unscathed.

So, with nobody even aware they’re there, somehow or other they must rescue themselves. On their perilous way down the mountain, luckily, they find a cave from central casting, with fabulous stalactites. What they never find, alas, is a scrap of plausibility.

Of course, it’s always fun to watch Winslet acting her socks off, even though she keeps them firmly on here, at least until another convenient discovery in the wintry wilderness — a house with a bed — encourages Alex and Ben to get naked.

But, really, what a waste of talent this film represents — and that goes for its director Hany Abu-Assad as well. He has Oscar nominations to his name, but now he also has this, a picture that deserves to be buried under 100ft of snow and never found again.