Fridae

Man On A Ledge is directed by the apparently talented Danish documentarian Asger Leth, whose previous film Ghosts of Cite Soleil was an uncompromising look into Haitian slum life. His first American feature alas is a highly implausible flavour-of-the-month movie seemingly made to cash in on American discontent with the economy, deriving its limited appeal from the spectacles of Occupy Wall Street and the 'one-percenters'.

It won't serve as a spoiler since it's revealed pretty early on the background to the main character. Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington and his seemingly undetachable Australian accent) is an honest New York cop betrayed by crooked colleagues and framed for stealing and selling a valuable diamond belonging to a wealthy one-percenter real estate mogul named David Englander (Ed Harris).

Escaping from prison, Nick teams up with his brother Joey (Jamie Bell) and his sexy Latina girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) to hatch a plan of revenge. Nick will create a spectacle in New York City by pretending he is about to commit suicide by jumping off a ledge, while Joey and Angie will pull off a heist by breaking into the vaults of Englander. The latter of course is an excuse for a sequence featuring Genesis Rodriguez's rather curvy form squeezed into a leather catsuit and engaged in a low-budget version of Mission Impossible style hijinks. Meanwhile, disgraced negotiator Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks), whose previous attempts at negotiation have earned her the nickname of Grim Reaper for her failures, tries to talk Nick down, only to be implicated in the far greater plan at hand. Nick, the man on the ledge, becomes a hero to those New Yorker 99-percenters that have gathered to watch him.

Leth directs skilfully, lending Nick's predicament a real urgency, his tight camerawork and fleet footed pacing showing his roots in documentaries. Still, Pablo Fenjves' script renders the characters and their settings and motivations as profoundly cartoonish. Instead of a satire on media circuses surrounding tragedies like Ace in the Hole or a Noirish portrait of desperate man like The Long Night, Man On A Ledge is like merely a cartoon fantasy of economic revenge. The 99-percenter heroes are brave, funny and honorable, and the one-percenter villain, in what seems to be a waste of Ed Harris' significant talents, is a hard-bitten, unfeeling monster. The end purpose of this well-made but rather unoriginal action movie is to ironically, simply function as a quick cash cow for discontent towards Wall Street and the economy in general.