Cliffhanger

I am ashamed to admit but I had never seen Cliffhanger before tonight. I didn't even intend to watch it now I was just killing some time before watching the premiere of Dollhouse (guess I'll be catching that this weekend), saw that it was on and got completely sucked in. It has all the ingredients of a great eighties action film, to wit:

-A hero who suffers a tragedy at the beginning of the film (in this case Stallone being unable to save his friend's wife during a rescue attempt) and the guilt wracks him to such a degree he just can't go back to work (mountain rescue). But he's pulled back in for one last job because nobody else can do what he can.
-An tremendously over the top (but in the right way, think Alan Rickman in Die Hard) bad guy (played by John Lithgow) who thinks nothing of disposing of henchman whenever it suits his purposes
-Ridiculous fight scenes (Stallone rides one of the disposable henchman like a sled down a slope and then throws him over the edge)
-Acting that's just good enough so you don't start completely laughing, but not so good that you actually start to think too hard about the character motivations.
-I also really enjoyed the economy of the plot. Lithgow and company try to perform a mid air robbery of a treasury plane, it goes bad, and they end up stranded in the mountains with the three containers (with helpful beacons) strewn about the peaks. They call in a false distress call and Stallone is roped in to help his old friend go and save them. They're captured, Stallone gets away, and its a race to see who can get to the containers first (while stallone tries to keep his buddy and wife/girlfirend alive). That's it, no other plots or metaphors to clutter things up, just alot of grunting, flexing, hitting people with Ice Axes, military pressing bad guys into stalagtites, and dare I say hanging from cliffs. I love it.
-The obligatory black henchman isn't even the first one to die
-They most definitely went to slow mo and cut out the sound for the killing of one of the characters and then let him die in one of the protagonists arms:
Hank:(anguished yell) This Man never hurt anybody
Lithgow: (possibly kicking a kitten)touching, crystal check the chopper.
-There may or may not be a scene where a shirtless stallone is trapped under the ice and shoots the bad guy through the ice with some sort of rappelling gun.
-The film ends with stallone essentially lassoing lithgow's helicopter to the side of a mountain, and causing it to crash. Stallone and lithgow then engage in hand to hand combat while hanging from a rope ladder (don't worry about how they got there), which Stallone wins by biting Lithgow, and sending him to his death.

To steal a line from Adam Carolla this truly is a basic cable classic. I'm ashamed that its taken this much time for me to see it.