"Hello Major. Saw you on TV. You looked good. You really did, you looked good. We also saw 'em give you a whole shitload full of silver dollars. And me an' the boys, we were in the neighborhood and we thought maybe you should give us some of them silver dollars."

"You know you don't have to do any of this. You don't have to go after these guys. We could just jump in the car and go a thousand miles from here and nobody'd know any different. Bury the guns in the desert."

"Now you are gonna tell us where that money is sooner or later. I would suggest sooner, 'cause later may be too late."

"Major Charles Rane Has Come Home To War!"

"Tommy Lee Jones - Sergeant Johnny Vohden"

"You learn to love the rope. That's how you beat 'em. That's how you beat people who torture you. You learn to love 'em. Then they don't know you're beatin' 'em."

"Linda Haynes - Linda Forchet"

"[pulling hook from Lopez' hand and leaving] You could lose a hand like that."

"Don't bother to buckle up - you may not want to survive this."

"Kill a few people, they call you a murderer. Kill a million and you're a conqueror."

"My guess is that it won't flop, because it delivers precisely what it promises. It's a big-budget extravaganza with a lot of stunts and visual effects, starring Stallone as a professional mountain climber and rescue expert, who gets roped into a scheme masterminded by criminal skyjackers. True, there's not a moment in the plot that I could believe. That didn't bother me for an instant. "Cliffhanger" is a device to entertain us, and it works, especially during those moments when Stallone is hanging by his fingernails over a three-mile fall, and the bad guys are stomping on him. The movie begins with a clever mid-air theft and crash-landing: sort of a cross between "The Pursuit of D. B. cooper" and "Alive!" A gang of expert criminals, led by John Lithgow, hijacks a U.S. Treasury plane carrying millions of dollars in large bills."

"The credits mention a lot of stunt persons, who deserve any credit they can get, because many of the most hazardous stunts in this movie were obviously not faked. That stuntman who makes the mid-air transfer between two planes deserves a gold medal. And at one point, we can clearly see that Stallone himself is dangling over a nightmarish fall. Movies like this are machines for involving us and thrilling us. "Cliffhanger" is a fairly good machine."

"HARLIN: Actually, it was first a movie called Gale Force, which was a hurricane movie. That script never came together, and then the same deal was replaced with Cliffhanger."

"IGNFF: What was the development process for Cliffhanger? It wasn't written with Stallone in mind, was it?"

""CLIFFHANGER," the new high-altitude thriller starring Sylvester Stallone, wastes no time in establishing its first priority, that of sending its audience into a cold sweat. This effect is achieved spectacularly well with a long, death-defying credit sequence set somewhere near the ozone layer. Mr. Stallone, playing a pumped-up Rocky Mountain rescue worker with an incongruously Presidential haircut, does his best to save a young woman who hangs precariously from a rope across a terrifyingly deep abyss. You will be in no hurry to mountain-climb after watching this scene. At such moments, and "Cliffhanger" has many of them, thoughts about life insurance come to mind. Was Sylvester Stallone really filmed atop the dizzyingly high, needle-shaped peak that figures prominently in the film's opening? Did he really scale the kinds of cliffs and mountainsides that are seen here? Did he hang in midair from a fraying rope, cross great chasms via rickety bridges or battle over a helicopter about to plunge into oblivion? Obviously, a great deal of credit goes to stunt doubles and optical tricks, but the illusion is still astonishingly effective. "Cliffhanger" really seems to be set somewhere up in the sky."

"Another problem for Stallone, as well as "Cliffhanger's" most offensive aspect, is the way he insists on playing average guy Gabe as if he's more invulnerable than the Terminator. Both Gabe and Hal receive horrendous beatings from the bad guys that are extended well beyond the point of sadism, beatings of a ferocity that would kill almost anyone, yet they survive with hardly a noticeable aftereffect. It is not a pretty picture and, if there was any sense in the ratings system, it would earn this picture an NC-17 instead of its timid R (for violence and language)."