Review of The Ledge (2011) by Lorenzo V — 27 Sep 2011

"One life. One chance. One step.".

A police officer looks to talk down a young man lured by his lover's husband to the ledge of a high rise, where he has one hour to contemplate a fateful decision.

REVIEW.

My, this movie has a lot of things spinning. It's like watching CNN for an hour with every conceivable topic trying to be covered. Here are some of them (I am sure I missed a few): religious conversion as in "born again" and no religion, infertility, adultery, gay, and trauma (all three main characters had some form of it). Conversations ensue on all these so it is a chatty film.

But the plot moves along with good twists and turns with a conclusive ending. I did find the character played by Liv Tyler to be overly subdued and monotone - and she rather slowed the film down too much. Or this film lacked energy bursts sometimes. For characters with a dysfunctional past they didn't seem particularly animated. I refer in particular to Liv Tyler who was selling herself for drugs and found the Lord through her husband. Or said another way, I would have expected a woman who opens a beer bottle with her teeth to be a little more spunky! Her husband (Patrick Wilson), it would seem, was a one-time pornographer and dealer who also found the Lord's calling - his anger is suppressed through his Biblical utterances.

The film does require some patience - it became too academic in the middle as well as artificial. I did enjoy the performance of Charlie Hunnan and Terrence Howard. In the end I suppose what we have left is love and acceptance.