“Ledge” hangs on by a thread

January 30, 2012 by Garrett Estrada 

Latest suspense flick is an enjoyable yet mindless ride

A crowd gathers in the street.

Fingers point in the air, a woman screams, police sirens blare and caution tape cordons off the area around the Roosevelt Hotel.

On a ledge, 20 stories above the excitement on the street, is a man. He shouts to the crowd “I’m an innocent man! This is my retrial!”

So starts Man on a Ledge, the story of Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington, Clash of the Titans), an escaped convict who has run out of options.

Cassidy’s plan is to get the attention of the whole city with his suicidal antics on the titular edge, while his brother and his brother’s girlfriend pull a complex diamond heist across the street.

Why? Because Cassidy was imprisoned for stealing the $40 million dollar jewel in the first place and supposedly selling it off in hundreds of pieces on the black market, a crime he says he never committed. If his brother can jack the diamond for real this time, it would prove his innocence and, for the most part, make for a pretty fun movie in the process.

The set-up is goofy for sure, but for a film that relies heavily on the main character pretending to want to kill himself, it ends up as an entertaining (if mindless) popcorn flick.

There are two main plotlines to follow through the story, the first and most obvious being Cassidy stranded on the side of a building.

Despite being limited in movement, he ends up having plenty of screen-time since he has to keep a police negotiator at bay (Elizabeth Banks, The Next Three Days) while also trying to secretly coordinate the heist via a hidden earpiece.

It’s fun to watch Worthington work his way through some tricky dialogue situations with Banks, since one mistake could kill the whole operation and send him back to the slammer.

The more entertaining story however, is the actual heist that’s undertaken by Joey Cassidy (Jamie Bell, The Eagle) and his girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez, Entourage). The two have fantastic charisma as a couple learning each other’s secrets in the midst of a Mission Impossible-esque heist. Rodriguez in particular steals every scene she’s in with her beautiful looks and snappy dialogue.

The main bad guy in the film, David Englander (Ed Harris, Appaloosa) is the typical super rich type who is more than willing to throw others into the fire if it makes him money.

While Harris does well in the role, the movie tries a little too hard to make the Englander character a metaphor for Wall Street greed, with some silly nods to the Occupy movement and the like. Those few moments felt unneeded and left a bad taste in my mouth.

But even if Man on a Ledge fails as a social and economic commentary of the times, it still makes for a slick, enjoyable heist picture — and that alone is worth the price.