Man on a Ledge
Asger Leth| C+
In his latest thriller, Man on a Ledge, directorAsger Lethuniquely maneuvers around the inescapable expectations of his film’s title but still fails to present the above average film many assumed it wouldn’t be. The film centers on fugitive Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington, Texas Killing Fields), a man who threatens to jump to his death from his Manhattan hotel window to everyone’s sinister entertainment. He is soon joined by Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks, Our Idiot Brother), a disgraced police negotiator who is hesitant but hopeful of talking down the ex-cop turned convict. Although it appears Nick is going to end his life, through a series of curious events one learns that Cassidy is actually diverting attention away from a huge diamond heist occurring just a few buildings down: a heist focused on unearthing the very diamond crooked tycoon David Englander (Ed Harris, That’s What I Am) framed him for stealing a year earlier. It is up to Cassidy to convince Mercer, the only one willing to listen, of his innocence and clear his tarnished name from the history books forever.
The challenge with using a blatantly foretelling title like Man on a Ledge is that spectators enter the movie thinking, “to jump or not to jump?” They know that the latter is not an option because jumping off the hotel ledge mid-movie would make it too short and unfulfilling. Consequently, the suspense that should build up from the presumably suicidal man standing centimeters away from plunging to his death just isn’t there. Actor Sam Worthington himself doesn’t even appear to be as frightened as he should be. It could be argued that Worthington was calmer in demeanor than he should have been because his character knew it was all a ruse. However, his failure to invoke the sentiment of outmost terror hovering thousands of feet above concrete calls attention to the fact that the landscape is a fake and possibly green screened. What’s so scary about that?
Asger Leth and writer Pablo F. Fenjves are able to save the thrill in this thriller by including a heist subplot to amend where the outer layer of the story fails. Burglaries, villains and corrupt police add cliché twists to the story, but they are the only semi-interesting things moving it along. Also, by slowly revealing Cassidy’s secret past overtime, spectators become anxious to know why he chose to get on that ledge in the first place. Since spectators are simultaneously learning Cassidy’s background story as he tells it to Mercer, they are as clueless to his capabilities as she is. This puts spectators in her shoes and heightens the tension from her lack of control.
Despite its clichés, predictability, and use of superficial stereotypes, it is still a clever movie. Various stories could have spawned from the simple concept of having a man on a ledge, but Leth and Fenjves chose to present an entertaining heist thriller that you’ll want to see once, maybe even twice.
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