Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The first must-see film of the year.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The acting in this movie is really good.

Dr. Jonathan Hemlock is a professor of art, a highly skilled mountain climber and a former assassin for the US government. He is lured out of retirement when a former colleague is murdered. The targets: the men who killed his friend. One catch: killing one of them will require him to climb his nemesis, the mountain that he has twice failed to scale: the Eiger.Directed by Clint Eastwood, scenic and action-filled but poorly written and hammily acted. Clumsy script with contrived plot developments, one-dimensional characters and dialogue that is ridiculous at times. Had a few moments when I thought "Did they just say that?". Yes, things were different 40+ years ago but some of the dialogue would have been pretty odd even for the 70s. Going with the one-dimensional characters, some pretty hammy acting. Even Clint Eastwood seems quite unconvincing. He can't blame the director - he was directing himself! This all said, the clumsiness and weakness of script mostly occurs in the first half of the movie - it gets better as it goes along. The cinematography is good, with some great Alpine scenes. Despite the generally badly-written dialogue, there are some good one-liners in there too.Overall, beneath Eastwood's abilities as both director and actor and not worth watching.

This is almost like a Bond movie: beautiful women, crazy and somehow scarred villain, great fight scenes, INCREDIBLE climbing scenes, stylish costumes and luxurious locations. You want to see Eastwood as a bespectacled professor who is actually a spy. Why he needs to climb some mountain now escapes me, but I watch spy movies for all of the above reasons. When he climbs that Totem Pole FOR REAL, I'm almost about to faint FOR REAL. I love the scenery and how well the costumes match the scenery. Thanks to this movie, I learned about Brenda Venus. So, I would say the casting is great, too. I love all the sexist/racist slurs that actually poke fun at sexism/racism. No one would dare do that today. Or climb the Totem Pole FOR REAL.

It's a 'one last job,two actually'plot.The 'job' ,Eastwood plays an ex mountaineer and art loving teacher with a class full of teenage girls, will feed his art obsession. He gets seduced on a plane by a hostess.I swear he says something about raping her as a demonstration of his desire.She's an agent.He's hired to bump off one of the mountaineering team.He doesn't know which one yet.This is a giant hole in the plot but a way to keep you guessing. The team is comprised of an older one with a nympho wife and 2 other Germans or Austrians.One is nice and one is nasty. Clint has to train with an old friend.Tough guy actor Burt Kennedy who spends the whole film angry,shouting obscenities and drinking beer.It's only 70s American beer though. He trains him with the help of a dark haired woman.At this point Clint starts a bizarre set of racist insults.It appears she is Native Indian.David Cassady's dad plays a 70s gay man.All safari suit,cravat,small dog.. The weather on the Eiger turns nasty.Clint survives of course and Burt turns out to be the target. A male fantasy.

Something tells me Clint isn't too picky about the scripts he agrees to do. I can only imagine how bad the novel this crap is based on must be. Plenty of nonsense had been crammed into this two-hour filmic banality.Clint rejects an illicit offer from one of his students – fine; we'll ignore that. It made for a vaguely amusing semi-anecdote which served to prove to us the stereotypically absurd wholesomeness of the hero's impeccable character. We then find out he collects art "masterpieces" for just a fraction of their real value; how he achieves this isn't explained at all, but we'll ignore this bit of hooey too, coz I really couldn't give a rat's ass about over-rated, over-priced canvas blotches. But then the real nonsense kicks in. Clint's former boss is a fat albino who is forced to live in near-complete darkness at all times; no, I can't ignore this at all. How the hell does a man with such a debilitating condition climb up the government ranks all the way to the top of the CIA? Do government suits scout dark hospital rooms and peruse through medical files for potential albino talent? Have YOU ever seen or heard of a top government official who was born a paraplegic, an albino, or with some other extreme, crippling affliction? Even the James Bond franchise hasn't yet dabbled with albino villains or albino Ms or Qs. How could Clint's character possibly be so STUPID not to suspect that the black girl is a plant? (I don't mean a tree or a flower; the only vegetable in this context is guy who concocted the novel.) Perhaps the book goes into greater details, explaining how huge his Ego must be, not allowing him to just consider the possibility than not all stewardesses would offer him sex within seconds of seeing him for the first time, hence that they might have ulterior motives. But fine, not all action-movie heroes have to be the brightest cookies.The worst aspect of TES, however, is its essential premise: the micro-film with a biological warfare formula. Can you possibly guess the "great plot-twist"? It turns out to be a fake formula, its sole purpose being to make the Russkies hunt it down. WHY though? As soon as the Soviets get the formula, they will test it – and then realize that it's fake! So what could the U.S. government POSSIBLY gain with this silly, expensive, overly complex ploy? Nothing at all. In fact, they lose a few men, and have to dish out $120,000 to Clint - and even listen to his self-righteous political speeches. Then again, perhaps I am too stupid to understand how watching the Soviets waste a few weeks on a formula that doesn't work might be a very clever idea, or of what military or strategic use this might be. As soon as the Russians realize it's fake they'll renew their search for the real one. Or did Clint the Eastwood seriously expect us to think that Russians would lock up the formula in some safe, never to be looked at again, once they got hold of it? Then again, I doubt Clint expects his viewers to think at all; nothing new, considering how many dumb movies he'd directed. Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh… and duh. The fact that Clint is forced to CLIMB A MOUNTAIN UNDER DANGEROUS CONDITIONS in order to carry out the "sanction" – without even knowing who that target is – only adds to the unintentional comedy. Couldn't he just have WAITED for their expedition to come back down? Or terminated his target before the climb? Since when is it only possible to assassinate a mountain-climber DURING a mountain climb? Perhaps the only way to kill an astronaut would be to wait for him to fly to the Moon… For some reason, the only way to find out the identity of his target was to join the mountaineering expedition. Did that work? No, but all the members of the expedition got killed in accidents anyway! I'd expect to find this kind of nonsense in a parody of a thriller, not a thriller itself.Perhaps the movie was simply cursed by having a notable "Plan 9 From Outer Space" alumni on board. Gregory Walcott; the comic-relief(?) that Clint gets to beat up every once in a while, lending further credence to theories that this movie was in fact a parody.One of many silly plot-twists – and one even a vodka-gorged chimp could see an hour in advance – is that George Kennedy is the man Clint had been looking for all along. Kennedy was far too friendly with Clint, and this made him instantly suspicious. (Which goes to show how clichéd the script is.) Kennedy suddenly develops a limp, the one clue Clint had to go on, just because it got cold. So the limp leg was in no danger of limping during those earlier practice climbs back in the States? Duh, duh, duh. Very predictably, Clint doesn't kill him. Instead, he kills thousands of the viewer's brain-cells.Worse yet, this goofy little thriller has a political message to convey, as well. You must have met people who considered both sides of The Cold War to have been equally vicious and evil; everyone knows at least one idiot of that sort. Well, that is precisely the idiotic message: both sides are ideologically corrupt, and it doesn't matter whose side you're on. Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh… So the U.S. had millions of labour camps i.e. gulags too? Long lines for toilet paper? Millions of people trying to get OUT (of the USSR) as opposed to trying to get IN (the U.S.)? This is typical malcontent, left-wing drivel written by a closet Marxist. Clint, a paid assassin, moralizes through his clenched teeth, giving pacifist speeches about double-standards in super-power politics. It doesn't get dumber than that.