Almost as soon as Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) steps onto the ledge outside his Roosevelt Hotel room, he’s spotted by a woman on the sidewalk below. The camera peers down on her from his view 21 floors up, but you can make out that she’s pointing and proclaiming that there is indeed… a man on a ledge.
So begins the not-so-imaginatively-titled Man on a Ledge, in which Nick stands and sways and sometimes gesticulates on said spot, while a crowd quickly amasses below. Being standard-movie-issue New Yorkers, they are increasingly vocal about their desire to see that man jump. They’re also barely held back by cynical uniformed policemen and occasionally entertained by stand-up reporters, all apparently reduced and represented by one Suzie Morales (Kyra Sedgwick), primping her hair and over-rolling the R in her name so you get that she’s as broadly unserious as everyone else on the street.
This unseriousness suffuses this caper film, making it partly a lark and partly just dumb. The low-wattage Nick looks like a mastermind as he’s set against a number of slow-thinking corrupt cops — his former colleagues — as well as their off-the-books employer, the frighteningly wealthy real estate tycoon David Englander (Ed Harris, always welcome and again underused). A few actionated flashbacks reveal that Nick was falsely convicted and sent to Sing Sing for stealing a humungo diamond from Englander, after which he escaped (while attending his cop-dad’s funeral) and made his way to the ledge. From here, he proceeds to manipulate or direct the parts played, knowingly or unknowingly, by the supporting cast. Nick has a former partner named Mike (Anthony Mackie) and a brother named Joey (Jamie Bell), who in turn has a girlfriend-who-looks-awesome-in-her-pink-underwear named Angie (Genesis Rodriguez).
Nick also has a new best friend, Lydia (Elizabeth Banks), an NYPD negotiator currently not recovering from the traumatic loss of a cop who jumped off a bridge. Her colleague, Detective Jack Dougherty (Edward Burns), suspects a scheme is afoot when Nick requests her by name, but he’s not quick to pursue possibilities or even do much research.
Lydia, on the other hand, is herself the subject of Nick’s extensive research: he knows why, when you first see her, she’s waking late and unkempt after a night spent drinking herself into forgetting the jumper she didn’t save, and he knows just when she’ll be angling for his info or willing to put off her superiors. ON meeting Nick, she offers the lesson of her own experience, “This looking off into the abyss stuff, it’s no good.” Yes, he plays her. And yes, she’ll be grateful, after she’s mad.
As scrappy Jack and empathic Lydia spend most of the movie a few steps behind Nick, you’re allowed feel comparatively in the know, because you’re usually at least a step or two ahead. This because you’ve seen Nick’s movie before, if not in its 1958 TV antecedent, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Man With a Problem, then in its many previous caper flick permutations: call it Inside Man, Relocated, or, more to the point: Outside Man.
As soon as you know Nick has a beef with the cops, as well as a brother who’s been training in Mission Impossible-style cat-burglaring, you know how the rest of the movie will go. That’s not to say that it makes sense, but it makes clear enough what and who Nick is up against, namely, Englander. Nick stages the ledge business on the very day his adversary means to get a Big Deal done, and so the movie cuts repeatedly to the villain in his sleek offices (ultra-conveniently located across the street from the Roosevelt), where he offers his own backstory (he lost millions to Lehman Brothers) and vividly berates his underlings.
Englander is full-bore bad, a one-percenter whom everyone — including the gawkers who wait on the sidewalk all day, perhaps because they’re unemployed — will be happy to see punished, on the street and quite brutally. While it’s not surprising that Man on a Ledge taps into such simple pop politics, you can’t help wishing it was smarter or more original, or at least paid attention to details.
Inside Man relies on cliches too — a Nazi villain, world-weary cops, corrupt politicians — but it filters them through specific imagery and allusions, New York as mythic and actual place, ongoing post-9/11 tensions, and viewers’ own intelligence. Man on a Ledge borrows easy references (“Attica!”, shouts one galvanized, designated homeless onlooker, though whether he’s remembering Al Pacino or Clive Owen is unclear) but glosses over contexts. It’s content to distract and be distracted.