Extreme-sports flick does a face-plant

"Extreme Ops" is a movie about a film crew of extreme-sports enthusiasts filming a commercial in the Austrian Alps. They stay at the top of a mountain in a not-yet-finished resort. Also inhabiting this resort is Slobodan Pavle, a Serbian terrorist who was thought to have been killed in a plane crash.\nWhile trying to film the terrorist's girlfriend getting undressed, the snowboarders accidentally film Pavle as well. The terrorists discover this and try to kill the film crew. A chase ensues, with the crew jumping out of a cable car and skiing down the mountain pursued by a helicopter. \nFirst, each character is a cliché: there is the crazy, doesn't-care-about-the-rules guy; the tomboyish girl; the lovable loser who has a crush on the tomboy; a prissy model-type girl; the prick non-skiing producer; and the tough, emotionless leader. Yet the list of B-movie actors who play the roles do so without much conviction, leading one to assume that they were only hired for the skiing ability (until you see the list of stunt skiers).\nSecond, special effects in this movie leave something to be desired. Aerial shots of the mountain resort very clearly look animated, as does the avalanche that the skiers try to outrun at the end of the movie. The irony of this is that the whole reason the film crew went to the mountain was to film a scene of the girl being chased by an avalanche that looked real and wasn't a CGI image.\nFinally, if "Extreme Ops" was supposed to be a series of extreme-sport clips, it would have worked better than the plot of this movie. The skiing sequences did display the excellent talent of the stunt skiers, and this was the shining point of the film. Fighting terrorists, which was advertised as the main plot, doesn't come into play until near the end, and then it seems to just be a reason to get the film crew off the mountain and end the movie.