Man on a Ledge

Man on a Ledge is a misleading title. Unlike Snakes on a Plane or Zombie Strippers, whose titles reflected everything they had to offer, Man on a Ledge tries to be more. It starts, sure enough, with a man on a ledge, but its story isn’t confined to that man or that location. Its seemingly succinct title is just a glimpse of what the movie has to offer. Unfortunately, what it offers doesn’t amount to much more than the occasional mild thrill. It’s not the worst movie to ever come out in the dump month of January, but it’s a good example of why this time of year is the worst for moviegoers. Even movies with interesting premises and plenty of potential fail to live up to quality standards.

The film stars as Sam Worthington as Nick Cassidy, the titular man on the ledge. He has just escaped from prison after being convicted of stealing a $40 million diamond from a real estate mogul named David Englander, played by Ed Harris, a crime he claims he didn’t commit. Now he wants to clear his name, but to do so would mean finding the diamond in Englander’s possession and showing to the world that he was set up. So as he talks with a police psychologist, played by Elizabeth Banks, about his intentions, a massive heist run by Nick’s brother and his brother’s girlfriend, played by Jamie Bell and Genesis Rodriguez, begins only a building over.

That’s a great premise if there ever was one. Sure, the trailers ruined it beforehand, but if you walked blindly into Man on a Ledge, it would look like a simple tale of a desperate man contemplating the unthinkable. The story twist would throw you for a loop, but that twist’s inherent intrigue never pans out into anything meaningful. Your interest grows weary as the story loses traction, becoming even more outlandish as each minute ticks by. For instance, after you learn that it took a year to plan the heist, you can’t help but role your eyes over the team’s approach, which involves such ridiculousness as taking a picture of a room with a digital camera and then dangling the picture in front of a security camera, slyly fooling the guard who just so happened to look away as they hung it up. Such a trite course of action surely couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to figure out, much less a year.

Though small in nature, quibbles like that eventually lead the viewer to a realization. How did the team know the layout of the building anyway, including the vents? How did they know what vault they would be up against once inside? How did they know anything at all? You’re supposed to just go with the fact that they planned for a year and already looked into everything, but I wasn’t buying it. The writing leaves too many questions unanswered and uses plot conveniences to get the characters where they need to be. Nothing is explained and the final twist, which will remain unspoiled, is a real head slapper. This thing needed at least an extra hour at its front to help lead into what you eventually see.

The thing is that if the heist was fun, these questions wouldn’t matter so much and would be easy to look past, but it’s relatively small in scale (at least compared to other heist movies) and the cutesy, flirty dialogue between the two pulling off the heist is beyond annoying. The over-the-top and comically insane heist pulled off in last year’s Tower Heist is more interesting (and believable) than this.

The men behind Nick’s set up are obvious from the get-go, Banks is miscast (in perhaps the worst actress-to-profession casting since Tara Reid as an anthropologist in Uwe Boll’s misfire, Alone in the Dark) and Worthington’s eventual transition into an action hero cross between James Bond and Spider-Man is sudden and insane, but it’s not all bad. Ed Harris is great as the evil mogul, which gives at least a little bit of a reason to care for the good guys to prevail and a couple of late movie stunts are fun to watch, but there comes a time when you want it to get to the point. The problem is that there is no point and its thrills are insubstantial, certainly not good enough to carry a 102 minute movie. It simply doesn’t have enough to sustain itself through what eventually becomes another lame, predictable action flop. Like I said earlier, Man on a Ledge may not be the worst movie to ever come out in January, but that in no way means it’s good.

Man on a Ledge receives 2/5

The Grey

These days, movie marketing seems to always do one of two things. It either shows far too much of the movie, spoiling any type of surprises it would have had in store for the audience, or it makes one out to be something it’s not. The trailers for director Joe Carnahan’s new film, The Grey, does both. The final shot of the entire film is actually in the commercials and it’s a shot that promises action, but The Grey is not an action movie. There are some thrills to be had, but this is a tale of survival, not constant gunfire and massive explosions. It’s going to disappoint some who go in with preconceived notions of what it should be in their head, but I plead you to keep an open mind instead. In a month normally designated for films the studio’s have no faith in, The Grey is a suspenseful, visceral, well made film that is absolutely worth a look.

Liam Neeson plays Ottway, an animal and weapons specialist who has been hired by an oil company to protect their drilling team from the numerous wild animals in Alaska. However, they never make it to the drilling site. On their way to their destination, their plane crashes and only a handful of them survive. The harsh weather conditions are enough to put them down for good, but unfortunately for them, there’s also a pack of wolves hunting them down. The plane has crashed somewhere near their den and the humans are seen as intruders.

The Grey doesn’t feature any aliens, robots, or even a human enemy. It’s merely about a group of men trying to survive the blistering cold and a pack of wolves and it’s as gripping as they come. It’s more suspenseful, interesting and, yes, frightening than most other movies in recent memory. Aside from a few unnecessary jump scenes, the creepiness derives from some excellent camerawork that frames the wolves in low lighting or emerging from a distance. The film also uses sound to a great degree to ratchet up the suspense, like one terrific scene where the guys are surrounded in the woods by the howling wolves, yet none are to be seen.

The delectable camerawork translates all through the movie, including the early plane crash scene where the camera pulls back through the entire cabin as the breath of the passengers waft through the air. Although due credit goes to cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, the same man who filmed one of last year’s best films, Warrior, director Joe Carnahan deserves the most accolades. Director of 2010’s over-the-top, but still fun The A-Team and 2002’s largely forgotten, but nevertheless fantastic Narc, Carnahan brings a steady direction to what could have otherwise been a hectic, Hollywood-ized tale. He doesn’t ratchet up the pace or bring in any distracting or unnecessary filmic techniques (aside from the aforementioned jump scenes). He crafts a movie that is about people and their will to survive even when the odds weigh heavily against them.

In that sense, it’s something that viewers will be able to connect to, even though they most likely haven’t been in a similar situation. Still, The Grey isn’t perfect. There are some humorous references to other films, the most effective being Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, but it’s a wink and a nod that doesn’t need to be there and although it will go over most people’s heads, those who have seen it will be pulled out of the movie. There are also some scenes that work great when isolated, but don’t work when in the context of the larger picture, like an early death scene after the plane crash where Ottway stands over one of the passengers and calms him down as he slowly dies. This moment is written and acted well, but we don’t even know who this guy is. The emotion isn’t there despite the technically effective production of the scene. I’m not too sure about the iffy ending either, given the dreamlike moments leading up to it where Ottway’s wife tells him to not be afraid. It seems to go through a sudden change, behaviorally and thematically, though to go into further detail would be ruining too much.

So there are some notable blunders, but whereas most movies would be dragged down tremendously for such mistakes, The Grey stands strong. Scenes that would be full of meandering dialogue in other movies serve to enhance character personalities and motivations here, so when something does happen to one of them, it hits you hard. The first couple months of every year usually bring some rotten movies to theaters, but if what follows can live up to the unexpected quality of The Grey, we’re in for a pleasant movie going year.

The Grey receives 4/5

The Iron Lady

There isn’t a movie buff out there who would argue that Meryl Streep is a bad actress. There probably isn’t even one who would argue she’s only good. The fact is she’s great. She always has been and she continues to impress year after year. Her yearly nominations in awards shows of all types are all wholly deserved. The same can be said for her performance in The Iron Lady. She is phenomenal and I wouldn’t be surprised to see her clutching an Oscar a couple months from now. That said, the movie is awful. It’s so bad on so many different levels, it boggles the mind. It may very well be the worst movie I’ve ever seen with a truly phenomenal, applaud worthy performance. Meryl Streep is fantastic. Everything else is rubbish.

Streep plays Margaret Thatcher, the first Prime Minister of England. The film, in the loosest and strangest way possible, traces the steps through her life, from a young adult with dreams of political grandeur to the old maid she became. Though a biopic in nature, The Iron Lady tries to be more. Director Phyllida Lloyd, whose only other notable feature is Mamma Mia!, doesn’t trust in the inherent intrigue of such a life and tries to spice up Thatcher’s story with premonitions of her dead husband and child, panicked zooms, slow motion, extremely out-of-place canted camera angles that serve no metaphorical or narrative purpose and pretty much every other over-stylized technique in the book, including an awkward shot where Thatcher floats down the hall while a crowd of people walk behind her. The pizzazz is misplaced. Add some scary music and half of this movie could play as horror.

What The Iron Lady really boils down to is a brilliant performer at the top of her game in front of the camera and a pretentious director behind it. The movie is over-stylized nonsense, a visual mess. But its problems exist in every other facet too, including the terrible editing where it would be too much of a compliment to say it doesn’t have a good flow (that would imply it has a flow at all). There are multiple cuts between past and present, some of which give no indication the switch was even made, and there are multiple moments where a time lapse happens, but the audio stays the same. Take, for instance, an early scene where young Thatcher’s point of view (and thus, position in the room) changes while her father’s words continue uninterrupted. These are rookie mistakes and they pervade the entire film.

To see those mistakes, however, you’d first to have to get past the writing, which is heavy laden with unbelievable and grating dialogue. Thatcher, a powerful figure and intelligent (though controversial) woman, comes off as a joke in the film, always speaking in “speech,” as if she’s addressing a crowd or nation. Even when she goes to the doctor’s office for a check-up, she goes off on an unnecessary rant made all the more laughable given that she’s in a patient’s robe. By the time, you get to the end, you’ve already stopped caring (if you ever did at all), but the movie still manages to amaze by offering a silly, stupid, inane conclusion to the premonition plot thread.

The Iron Lady is dry, bland, slow, boring, pretentious, over-stylized, grating, amateurish and pretty much every other negative adjective in between with one shining star in the middle. As much as she deserves it, Streep’s shoe-in awards nominations will only give the film more exposure and lead more people to watching it, wasting precious hours in their short lives. Perhaps, just this once, we should ignore the power of Streep and let her movie fade into oblivion. We'll be doing the world a favor.

The Iron  Lady receives 1/5

The Devil Inside

A lot of people these days criticize mockumentaries and “found footage” films. I’ve always been one of their defenders. I think the style allow for more realism. Conventional horror movie techniques are overshadowed in favor of simple, subtle frights, not exaggerated violence and “Boo!” scares. After watching The Devil Inside, though, I’m quickly changing my tune. This subgenre of film has presented only a small number of tricks and after The Blair Witch Project, The Last Exorcism, REC and three Paranormal Activity films, I think we’ve just about seen them all.

The story of The Devil Inside revolves around a young woman named Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade) who wishes to know whether her mother (Suzan Crowley), who was institutionalized after murdering three people years ago, is simply crazy or possessed by the devil (take a guess which one it is). So she employs the help of two Catholic priests-in-training named Ben (Simon Quarterman) and David (Evan Helmuth) who agree to let her and her documentary filmmaker film them as they perform an exorcism without the church’s permission.

Of course, that begs the question, why in the world would they do that? As the film so kindly points out, performing an exorcism without the church’s permission is grounds for excommunication, but they let them keep right on filming anyway. “All media coverage is banned,” one of the priests even says as they drive to perform an exorcism while the documentarian lugs his camera around, as if a documentary is somehow more acceptable. It’s a lapse of logic so huge that it’s impossible to get past. Watching this movie is like watching someone accidentally walk into a glass door, pause for a second and then do it again. You can’t help but throw your hands up and laugh at what I feel I can safely say is the most poorly planned out movie I’ve seen in years.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, Paramount Pictures snatched up the rights to this movie with the hopes that it would turn into their next Paranormal Activity. There are clearly hints of that film (and about a dozen others) in this one, but there’s a difference between using it as inspiration and simply riding its coattails. The Devil Inside clearly does the latter. One can’t help but get the sneaking suspicion that if horror mockumentaries hadn’t gained so much popularity over the last few years, this never would have been made. In a strange way, it makes all the great movies that have come before seem redundant.

Think of your five favorite foods in the world. Then think about blending them together and choking them down. So much good has suddenly become bad. The Devil Inside is kind of like that. It begins like the brilliant Australian horror mockumentary, Lake Mungo, complete with talking heads and back story akin to an actual documentary. It’s also very much like the aforementioned Paranormal Activity, with a number of cameras set up during the actual exorcisms, so as to provide fresh perspectives. At times, it even reminds of the underrated sequel, The Exorcist III, during its dialogue heavy asylum scenes. But whereas all three of those movies are great, The Devil Inside is garbage. Lake Mungo actually had an interesting story to tell with plot turns and an interesting twist. At 77 minutes without credits, this barely has a story at all and it offers no surprises. Paranormal Activity was all about minimalism and letting your imagination do all the scary work. This throws its supposed frights in your face. The dialogue in The Exorcist III was gripping and thought provoking. The Devil Inside was written by the same guys who wrote Stay Alive, which should be all I need to say about that.

If that’s not enough, you have story points that are said in passing, but never explored, like Ben’s haunted past involving the death of, I don’t know, someone and contrived scene set-ups, like when a parent says they needed to move their possessed daughter into the basement for no other reason I could ascertain than because it’s dark, decrepit, scary looking and a perfect fit for a horror film. Its worst offense, however, is its inability to maintain the documentary illusion. This thing uses film techniques that simply aren’t feasible in actual documentaries. Most of the time, it’s small things that most people won’t notice, like a sequence of shot reverse shots where the camera operators would have to be sharing the same space to pull off without time skips, and other times it’s something stupidly obvious, like a long shot that suddenly jumps forward to the object or person in the distance without missing a beat.

The Devil Inside is horribly sloppy. It feels like a college video project, with actors that only strengthen that feeling, and it’s entirely ineffective. If it had come out a week ago, it would have easily made my worst of the year list. It may very well indeed make my list this year, but if it’s lucky, by the time the end of 2012 rolls around, I’ll have completely forgotten about it.

The Devil Inside receives 0/5