Man on a Ledge

The premise of “Man on a Ledge” naturally calls for a constant assortment of nausea-inducing visuals; I trust you can decipher the reason why just by reading the film’s brilliantly blunt title. The film takes a man, takes a ledge and places the man on top of the ledge; it’s as simple a concept as that one from a few years back that placed some snakes on a plane – the film’s name escapes me. At many points throughout “Man on a Ledge,” we look down from the ledge and over the man’s feet to peer at the street 21 stories below, director Asger Leth playfully poking away at the audience’s tolerance for eye-crossingly big heights. As I’m sure you can imagine, this creates some hair-raising suspense and churns the stomach quite a bit, although the level of this nail-biting intensity is sadly not high enough to rescue the film from its aura of drabness.

I suppose this is only heightened by the recent release of “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” an action sequel in which director Brad Bird took Tom Cruise, handed him some high-tech sticking gloves and dangled him off the 100^th-plus storey of the Burj Khalifa, aka the tallest building on planet Earth. That was a tremendously dizzying sequence, a result of excellent craftsmanship from Mr Bird; unfortunately for Leth, his film can merely wobble in comparison with “MI4”’s vertigo-provoking sequences and consequently finds itself hurtling down towards the ground, arms and legs violently flailing, its teeny tiny brain quickly splattered all across the pavement below; I apologise for the graphic image, but it seemed necessary.

But Tom Cruise clinging onto the side of a national landmark is not the only hurdle “Man on a Ledge” clumsily trips over; I shall get to those later. First, though, I want to tell you why this man is on this ledge. To begin with, we don’t know why; we simply watch an American man, played by a mullet-sporting Sam Worthington (“Avatar”), going up to a room on the top floor of a Manhattan hotel. He orders room service, fails to eat the food, opens the window, takes a deep breath and climbs his way out to the ledge outside. Our first thought is that he is going to commit suicide; well, it would be, had the film’s trailer not given away 90% of the film’s content.

It soon transpires that the man is a fugitive ex-cop named Nick Cassidy. Nick has recently escaped from prison; his charge was the theft of a $40 million diamond stolen from corrupt businessman David Englander (Ed Harris, “The Way Back”), for which Nick was going to serve 25 years. However, Nick stubbornly claims that he is innocent and that Englander set him up; his method of proving this is apparently to stand on a ledge, cause a media storm and attract the attention of every citizen in New York – but that’s only half the plan; with all eyes on Nick, there are no eyes on the building across the street, where the diamond Englander reported stolen and missing is sitting in Englander’s vault, ready to be found by Nick’s brother, Joey (Jamie Bell, “The Adventures of Tintin”), and Joey’s sexy girlfriend, Angie (Genesis Rodriguez, “Casa de Mi Padre”).

Aside from the cheering crowd that gathers on the street below with sadistic watchfulness, Nick’s actions are an irritant for many. For example, there is negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks, “The Next Three Days”), whom Nick specifically asks to come talk to him on the ledge. Lydia is currently on leave following an incident in which a depressed cop she tried to coax out of jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, well, jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. There’s also Englander, a cardboard cut-out of a villain, played with shark-eyed intensity by an oddly committed Harris. While at first uninterested in hearing about the jumper on the building across the street, Englander’s ears suddenly prick up when he discovers that the jumper is the man he recently had sent to prison for a quarter of a century.

The film has a decent cast, and I’m including the usually charmless Worthington in that mix; surprisingly, he makes for a rather good leading man here, albeit occasionally stumbling back into the characteristic woodenness he displayed in “Clash of the Titans” and “Avatar.” Banks is also on fine form, as are Harris and Bell, who gets to perform some high-tech “Mission: Impossible”-esque stunts throughout the film; oh look, I’ve somehow managed to circle back to the “Mission: Impossible” franchise. Unfortunately, thanks to a dodgy, formulaic script, none of them have much to do outside of standing around and reading clunky dialogue; writer Pablo Fenjves seems to think in terms of plot points as opposed to character development and character distinction. As such, the cast is wasted and can do very little to engage the audience into the narrative, leaving us feeling indifferent about the advancement and outcome of the story; also, one would have to be blind, deaf and dumb to wrongly predict any of the increasingly hackneyed plot points.

I believe many will gain some enjoyment out of “Man on a Ledge;” it is, after all, slickly directed popcorn fluff that provides moderate thrills and a twisty turny plot. But I would be lying if I were to say I enjoyed it to the point where I liked it; I found myself rolling my eyes and shaking my head on far too often an occasion for me to call it a good movie. I see it as a slightly less gripping “Phone Booth,” a Joel Schumacher thriller from 2002; that film also contained a sadistic crowd of bystanders watching the troubled hero in eager excitement – here, I found the crowd much more difficult to empathise with.

5/10