- Man on a Ledge. Directed by Asger Leth. Starring Sam Worthington, Ed Harris and Elizabeth Banks. Rating: 5 (out of 10)
A genuinely suicidal man threatening to jump from a high building would make for a really boring feature film. Or a very short one.
However, throw in a jazzy side plot about a prison break, a heist featuring one of the world's biggest diamonds and some crooked cops, and things start to look up, while we're being told not to look down.
The film opens with a man checking into a room on the 21st floor of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. He orders room service, he wipes the place down, then he steps out onto the ledge (and that first step's a doozy).
The man in question turns out to be Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington), ex-cop and recent prison escapee. A gawking crowd and predatory news crew quickly form at street level, thirsty for blood. The street takes on a carnival-like atmosphere, complete with people excited by the break in their routine and an enterprising hot dog vendor.
Nick has only one demand when the NYPD responds: he wants to talk to detective Lydia Mercer. But Lydia (Elizabeth Banks) hasn't slept since she failed to talk a rookie cop out of leaping off a bridge; she's lost her edge. Luckily, as we learn too soon, Nick doesn't really want to end it all: the whole thing is an elaborate smokescreen for a high-stakes heist going on in the building across the street.
The theft is by no means a getrichquick scheme: Nick is hoping to prove his innocence once and for all. Carrying out the heist are Nick's brother Joey (Jamie Bell) and his girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez), verbally sparring and providing the film's comic relief. On the receiving end of the larceny is malevolent businessman David Englander (Ed Harris), who, when he sees the traffic caused by the jumper, sees nothing wrong in asking "Why don't these people just shoot themselves in the head?"
So while the news crew (headed by Kyra Sedgwick) makes side bets on how soon Nick will swandive, Lydia tries to talk Nick down, ignorant of that earpiece he's wearing and his whispered instructions to his brother. They flirt. She stands up to a co-worker (Ed Burns) and gets her groove back. Now if only Nick would get off that ledge so they could get a beer or something . . .
Suspend all common sense by buying into the fact that stealing from the guy who framed you is a smart way to prove your innocence. Or that smallpotatoes troublemakers Joey and Angie could pull off a job this big. Or that Angie's biggest thing to worry about that morning was digging out her best bra-and-panties, all the better to wriggle through air ducts. This is heist-lite, after all, where the action is continuous, but predictable.
Nick's prison escape (shown in flashback), the parallel heist, and some business about who exactly it was who set Nick up, all guarantee that Man on a Ledge doesn't venture into Phone Booth territory, where one view is all the audience is afforded.
In The Next Three Days, Banks played a woman who escapes from prison after being wrongfully accused of murder. She does a nice job here playing a woman on the other side of the law. Worthington, saddled with some of the script's sillier lines, seems to trip over his American accent at times, though the pair have an amiable rapport. Director Asger Leth plays on audience vertigo and keeps things moving in his first feature, but much of Man on a Ledge's dialogue falls flat.
