Police thriller about a wrongly-accused criminal (Sam Worthington, Avatar) who threatens to jump from a high-rise ledge in order to talk with a negotiator (Elizabeth Banks, Catch Me If You Can) and orchestrate a plan to prove his innocence.
Nick (Worthington) was an honest cop who landed in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Desperate, he escapes and hours later stands on a New York City window ledge. Police cordon off the area and agree to Nick’s request to speak with police negotiator Lydia (Banks). But Lydia doesn’t know that she is part of his grand plan: the staged suicide is a diversion from a huge diamond heist happening somewhere else in the city. Also stars Ed Harris (The Truman Show) and Jamie Bell (King Kong).
Once in a while, a film comes along with exactly the right mixture of energy and amateurishness to promote it from so-bad-it’s-bad status up to so-bad-it’s-good. Displaying the pace, scale and utter witlessness of an early 1990s Arnie movie, Man On A Ledge teeters on that brink.
After breaking out of prison during a faked funeral (surely no mean feat for a publically disgraced policeman) Nick Cassidy (Worthington) checks into New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, eats a symbolic last meal, then climbs out the window and threatens to jump, causing the city to grind to a halt beneath him.
Although it seems like the filmmakers started with the title – or perhaps that dizzying fish-eyed poster – and worked outwards, it’s a work of multiple unlikely plot strands. Cassidy’s Negotiator-style attention-grab is a cover for another, even stupider, stunt, which involves his brother Joey (Bell) and Joey’s girlfriend (Rodriguez) attempting to steal a narratively significant diamond from baddie David Englander (Harris) to clear our hero’s good name
The fact they’re not even sure of the stone’s whereabouts doesn’t deter them, and why should it? Nobody here seems to know what they’re doing. Elizabeth Banks makes an unlikely hostage expert, Worthington and Bell are difficult to buy as brothers, let alone Americans, and the logic of committing a string of extremely high-profile crimes to prove your innocence is never questioned. For these reasons, and more, Man fails as a big-screen release, but depending on your levels of credulity – and blood alcohol – it might just pass muster as a late-night six-pack flick.
By Matt Glasby, Flicks.co.nz
This was amazing i was so impressed with this movie and the great camera shots. It also had a great story and i thought the actors did a great job. 5 stars
As the plot unfolds, brick by brick, the structure starts to wobble until it finally collapses into unintentional comedy.
The movie cuts back and forth between two preposterous plot lines and uses the man on the ledge as a device to pump up the tension.
It doesn't spend enough time on its ledge to be the definitive 'jumper' movie the title promises, but it’s a hoot if approached in the proper mood.
To his credit, director Asger Leth (Ghosts of Cite Soleil) gets right to the business at hand where the set-up is concerned, but it's in the execution that this would-be thriller falls flat.
Rarely has a film exhibited a bigger disconnect between urban realism and utter ludicrousness.
