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©Summit Entertainment
Sam Worthington and Elizabeth Banks in Man on a
Ledge.
by Kurt Loder, Gazette Movie
Critic
Man on a Ledge
Directed by: Asger Leth
Running Time: 102 minutes
Principal Actors:
Sam Worthington — Nick Cassidy
Elizabeth Banks — Lydia Mercer
Anthony Mackie — Mike Ackerman
Rated: PG-13
Grade: ** (out of 5)
Man on a Ledge is a tight little
crime thriller, a heist-movie variant, with a
few small problems and one big one. Given the
top-notchness of the supporting actors here
assembled, Ed Harris, Jamie Bell, Anthony
Mackie, Titus Welliver, the casting of doughy
Sam Worthington in the lead seems crucially
ill-advised. True, Worthington was also the
nominal star of James Cameron’s Avatar; but
really, who will ever think of that techno-epic
as a Sam Worthington film? The mildly amiable
Aussie is a stranger to star power, and putting
him at the center of this picture is like
building a fancy banquet around a main course of
vanilla pudding.
In any case, the character Worthington has been
called upon to play would challenge many a more
resourceful actor. Nick Cassidy is a disgraced
New York City cop, framed for a high-profile
jewel theft and consigned to Sing Sing for a
very long stretch, who escapes his warders,
returns to Manhattan, checks into a room on the
21st floor of a midtown hotel, climbs out the
window and then spends most of the rest of the
movie huddled on the titular ledge, in what we
at first take to be suicidal despair. This
constrained situation offers little opportunity
for physical or emotional expression, and it
shines a cruel light on Worthington’s charisma
deficit.
Still, there’s some snappy action going on all
around him. The script, by Pablo F. Fenjves, a
star-bio specialist whose literary credits
include ghostwriting the reviled O.J. Simpson
murder book, If I Did It, is a compendium of
nicely tweaked genre cliches. As a police
suicide-prevention specialist named Lydia Mercer
(Elizabeth Banks, boldly miscast) attempts to
talk Nick back into his hotel room; we notice
that he’s wearing a small wireless broadcast
rig. Then we see that what he’s actually doing
is supervising a break-in to a jewel vault at a
building nearby, a robbery that’s being pulled
off by Nick’s brother Joey (Bell) and his hot
Latina girlfriend, Angie (emphatically hot
Genesis Rodriguez). The object of this caper is
to retrieve a golf ball-sized rock called the
Monarch Diamond, the gem allegedly stolen by
Nick from frothingly evil real estate mogul
David Englander (Harris). If Joey and Angie can
repossess the diamond...well, you get the idea.
Stirrings of romance between Nick and Lydia as
she attempts to sweet-talk him off his ledge are
too silly to merit much attention, but some of
the police on the scene keep things lively,
especially hard-nosed top cop Marcus (Welliver);
Nick’s old partner Ackerman (Mackie), who’s
convinced his friend is innocent; and
mild-mannered Dougherty (Ed Burns), whose
purpose is to express withering resentment over
Lydia’s presence. And the affectionate
wisecracking between Bell and Rodriguez as they
go about their break-in lends a nice comedic
tartness to the proceedings. Less helpful,
wholly unnecessary, in fact, is the presence in
the crowded street down below Nick’s lofty perch
of a TV news-honey named Suzie Morales, who is
for some reason played by the distinctively
un-Latina-like Kyra Sedgwick.
The Danish director, Asger Leth, heretofore a
maker of documentaries, works up some familiar
tension in cutting back and forth between Nick
muttering on his ledge as a tactical squad
closes in to force him off it and Joey and Angie
going about their burglary, which involves all
the usual vent-crawling, shaft-climbing and
tech-wielding neutralization of various security
alarms. A lot of their ingenuity is fairly
entertaining, if light on surprise. But then,
again and again, just as we’re beginning to take
a sustained interest in the story, it hauls us
back to Worthington, and pudding is served.
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