Saturday 25 February 2012

Man on a Ledge

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Year:2012
Country of origin:USA
Director:Asger Leth
Genre:High concept fluff
Starring:Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks, Jamie Bell, Génesis Rodríguez, Ed Harris
Rating:2/5
IMDB link:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568338/
Tagline:You can only push an innocent man so far.
Favourite line:None worth mentioning

High concept thriller that really wants to be the new Phone Booth.

The plot:
Sam 'Avatar' Worthington is Nick Cassidy, an ex-cop turned escaped convict.
His crime?
Stealing a $40 million diamond from wealthy businessman David Englander (Ed Harris).
Booking into a hotel, Cassidy eats a last meal, them clambers out of the window onto a ledge some several hundred feet up.
With all eyes on Cassidy, nobody pays much attention to the activity directly across the street, as an audacious diamond heist is in progress, in David Englander's building, no less…..

It's a really neat setup, and almost, almost works.
Trouble is, they keep bottling it and leaving the ledge.
In the intro, I referred to the Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland face-off that was Phone Booth: taut, efficient, utterly gripping, that's what this was going for, but the insistence on keep moving the action elsewhere lost all momentum.
Never quite sure whether it wanted to be a stripped down genre piece, a high tech' thriller in the mould of Mission: Impossible, or a balls out Hollywood actioner, this tries to blend all three, and ends up successful at none of them.
And don't get me stated about the end.
The second he started leaping from ledge to ledge like fucking Spiderman, I just lost interest.
A noble failure, this one.

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