With “Paradise Now” and “Omar,” a pair of standout dramas nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad proved himself adept at finding the human stories in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
In “The Mountain Between Us,” Abu-Assad’s first large-scale English language film, he plays romance against an epic story of survival. But, in this case, the approach shortchanges the character’s quest for life by reducing it to the prelude to a game of “will they or won’t they stay together?”
That’s a shame, because Abu-Assad is a director who could bring a fresh perspective to Hollywood films like this.