Man on a Ledge

In order to enjoy Man on a Ledge, one has to check their brain at the door. I'm perfectly willing to do just that, and for a while, the movie was kind of entertaining in a silly sort of way. But then, the movie just kept on going, and kept on asking me to dumb my brain down more and more to accept what was going on up on the screen. At a certain point, my damn brain just started resisting, and I just wasn't enjoying myself as much as I was.

Those of you who have seen the ad campaign know that the film has a great hook, with Sam Worthington playing a man staging a publicity stunt on the ledge of a building, threatening to kill himself, all the while distracting everybody from a heist going on at a nearby building. But this is not a crime movie. Worthington plays Nick Cassidy, a former cop who is in prison for a crime he claims he had nothing to do with. When he is let out of jail briefly to attend his father's funeral, Nick decides to stage a daring escape by getting in a fight with his brother (Jamie Bell) and the two cops who are escorting him. He winds up stealing one of the cops' gun, and swipes the brother's car in the process. A chase ensues, in which Nick is able to lose the pursuing cops by driving in the path of an oncoming train. Did he know the train was going to be crossing the tracks at that precise moment? Was it part of his plan? This is not the first time we'll find ourselves questioning Nick's plan to supposedly clear his name.

Flash forward one month later, and Nick is still on the lam, and checking into the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City under a fake name. He takes a room on the 21st floor facing a certain side of the city, treats himself to some room service, writes what looks like a brief suicide note, and then climbs out onto the ledge of the window, where he is quickly spotted by some bystanders on the street below. The police and news media instantly swarm to the scene, and we're introduced to our other key characters, including a sarcastic cop named Jack Dougherty (Edward Burns), and a NYPD crisis negotiator named Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), whom Nick asks for specifically by name. While all this is going on, Nick's brother from the funeral, Joey (who it turns out was in on the escape play the entire time) and Joey's girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) are breaking into a building across from the hotel. They're climbing through air vents, rigging security cameras, and disabling heat sensors. If we didn't see this kind of stuff done a lot better in the last Mission: Impossible movie, I would have been more impressed.

It's about this time we are introduced to one of the film's central villains, a cold millionaire named David Englander (Ed Harris). Harris plays the role as an almost cartoonish villain to the point that he starts to resemble a live action version of C. Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. When his secretary tells him that traffic is tied up due to a man threatening to jump from a building, he simply rolls his eyes and says, "Why don't people just shoot themselves anymore"? We know that the suicide stunt going on at the hotel, the heist (that's going on at a building owned by the millionaire), and the evil millionaire all will eventually be tied together. I won't go any further into the plan or the plot in order to avoid spoilers, but I will say this - Man on a Ledge relies on way too many coincidences and chances to make me comfortable enough to go along with.

Okay, I can sort of believe that Nick could stage an incident where he almost falls off the ledge, so that he can distract everyone, so they won't notice his brother and his girlfriend setting off a small bomb on the building across the street. But the way everything just falls into place completely baffled me. The funeral, the publicity stunt at the hotel, the heist...Everything would have to be planned out to a ridiculous degree in order to work successfully. And when the movie tries to explain how these people were able to pull it off, it becomes even more implausible. We can only go along with this plot so far. By the time people are jumping off of the roofs of 20+ story buildings, and landing on the street with hardly a scratch or a limp (even if they did land on a giant inflatable air cushion used to catch jumpers), my brain was saying no more.

Man on a Ledge is dumb fun up to a point, but then it just sort of turns dumb. It's not a total lost cause, and like I said, I was willing to go along with it for a good part of the movie. There just comes a point where the audience becomes disconnected, stops having fun, and just starts marveling at the implausibility of it all. I've seen much dumber and much more impossible action thrillers. This one's mainly a disappointment because it starts out being so interesting and fun.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

0 comments