Man on a Ledge might be the most literal-titled, cliche-riddled movie anyone will see this year, but amid the sea of tropes and trash, there are clever moments, which makes it difficult to cheer for Nick Cassidy’s demise, but not impossible.
During his visit to the Roosevelt Hotel, Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) checks in under a pseudonym, orders a last meal of lobster, an incongruent side of pre-fab French fries, then carefully positions himself on the ledge, watching crowds of voyeurs form below him. But before the film repeatedly insists that the majority of people in New York City are bloodthirsty, ravenous predators, we get a bit of exposition.
Jump back one month: Cassidy was a prisoner at Sing Sing, Prison in Ossining, New York. A wrongly convicted ex-NYPD officer, Cassidy is often visited by his former partner, Mike Ackerman (Anthony Mackie), laments his “screw up” brother, Joey (Jamie Bell), and learns about his dying father, who shortly becomes the deceased father. The funeral presents a perfect scenario for Cassidy and his brother to chastise each other, get into some fisticuffs, and opens the door for Cassidy’s escape.
And, we’re back on the ledge: denizens gather twenty-one stories below, imploring Cassidy to “Jump!,” like a delicious lemming over a pitf jackals. Their desires are further signaled through hand motions, which just seem a bit odd. Sure, people can be sadistic and insensitive, but do they actually want to see this guy splatter on the sidewalk? It seems more likely they would Youtube it or watch the clip on the local news after being forewarned of its “graphic nature.” The “man’s inhumanity to man angle” is understandable, but it’s a bit heavy handed here, which is a recurrent flaw throughout.
At times, moments are clever: Cassidy’s request of Detective Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks) is intriguing inasmuch as she’s recently acquired the sobriquet “grim reaper” because of her failed attempt to talk a rookie police officer off of the Brooklyn Bridge before he chose to swan dive to his death. This incident has led her to a ubiquitously known nightly vodkawine cocktail, a late brunch of aspirin, and chiding from her fellow detectives. Thus, she is the damaged, tortured anti-hero tasked with aiding the protagonist and finding redemption in the process. At the same time, Cassidy’s angle is that Mercer will draw a lot more television coverage than he alone would, which means that it will be difficult for NYPD officers to kill him when millions of citizens are watching via streaming video. Pretty intelligent plan on his part, considering his overall motive is to create a diversion so that his Joey (Surprise, they’re really friends and the whole “screw up” thing was a ruse!) and his overly attractive, underdressed girlfriend, Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) – who, as the movie progresses, resembles an MI 6 agent – can break into the building across the street, a building that happens to be owned by David Englander (Ed Harris), the man responsible for Cassidy’s incarceration.
A few years earlier, Cassidy was tasked with escorting Englander and a few of his bodyguards. (“He only hires cops,” so you can probably see where this is going in regards to a potential twist.) At some point in time, Cassidy wakes up after being drugged, and he’s taken into custody, accused of stealing a forty-million dollar diamond that Englander was carrying on his person. Cassidy vehemently denies the accusation but is ultimately found guilty. Why would Englander want to steal his own diamond? Money of course, first and foremost in the form of a forty-million dollar check from Lloyd’s of London, a conspiracy theory that snowballs throughout Man on a Ledge in redundant images and inorganically delivered lines positing the paraquatic nature of greed on American society:
The ticker at the bottom of the local news broadcast continuously delivers melancholic news of grandchildren “defrauding their senile grandmother.” As an additional distraction, Cassidy hurls rolls of money from the ledge. As it trickles down to the crowd, they become crawfish in a barrel. Englander, a racketeer masquerading as a philanthropist undulates cartoonishly from dashing lothario to insane sadist. A random police officer grumbles, “fucking money,” to which Ackerman rejoins “Women jump for love. Men jump for money.” (The twist becomes a bit transparent here, no?)
While her character has little to do with fiscal greed, the inclusion of Kyra Sedgewick as the stereotypical, attitude-filled, Hispanic local news reporter Susie Morales, whose accent comes out strongest when she roles her “r’s” on Morrrales, is a bit, well, too much and limns more of a caricature than any sort of dynamic character. First off, Sedgewick comes from an English / Jewish family, so it seems strange that a Hispanic actress could not have been found (and, ironically, makes her casting rather racist.) It’s possible the idea here could be to suggest that the reporter changes her name to something more ethnic to boost ratings or make herself more intriguing, but that seems a bit of a stretch. Additionally, her character is nearly as cartoonish as Englander’s: she’s a vindictive, evil, cutthroat newscaster who bets one-hundred dollars that Cassidy will leap in less than thirty minutes. The media and subjective journalism are ripe targets for criticism, but the personified evil here is equally as silly as the vulturous voyeurs.
The best parts of Man on a Ledge are in the building across the street. This is where the heist part of this film takes place, and, aside from the oft-versatile Angie, the plan is being executed by amateurs, often with chuckle-worthy, yet believable tension.
The unbelievable parts come after. Certainly, the first two thirds of the movie is replete with run-down plot points that lead to predictable outcomes, but the final twenty minutes delves into a realm of silliness unseen since Richard Gere’s battle with an evidently invincible drug dealer in Brooklyn’s Finest. The double agents are foreseeable, but a number of the twists are improbable and would require a dense cast of players to make the subversion plausible. Moreover, Cassidy’s proof of innocence is suspect at best and his subsequent retrial and all of that silly evidence stuff is completely waived by the governor, who seemingly just said, “Oops. You’re free to go to the bar and have a beer with Lydia Mercer while your brother proposes to his girlfriend.”
There are fun, tense, and sort-of-exciting moments here, but by the end, I was kind of hoping Morales would have won that hundred dollars.
