'The Ledge' directed by Mathew Chapman.

‘The Ledge’ directed by Mathew Chapman.

Produced by: Michael Mailer, Mark Damon and Mathew Chapman.

Written by: Mathew Chapman.

Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Terrence Howard, Liv Tyler and Patrick Wilson.

Release date: January 21^st, 2011 (Sundance)

Budget: $10 Million.

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought that it could be interesting. It’s essentially a thriller based around the conflict between religion and atheism, a debate which has grown in popularity since Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion and subsequently released a bee in the bonnet of pretty much anyone that takes the concept of faith seriously. I think there are a lot of people out there tapping away on keyboards that are all too ready to proudly take a position on the issue. All you need to do is sign up to an internet message board and hang around for a while before an atheism/religion argument pops up. I’m not saying that it’s not an important debate (it’s probably the most important), I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are too many people out there in cyberspace that are arguing the issue just for the sake of arguing (this is true of both sides). For the record I’m an atheist, and for one more record, I’m not a physicist or a biologist that has dedicated my life to the pursuit of answering the big questions. So for the remainder of this review, I’m gonna do what it is people who aren’t physicists or biologists should do when it comes to questions about reality: Shut the fuck up.

As an atheist, however, I was interested to see how the The Ledge would unfold. I went in expecting heated drama motivated by two opposing views of life. What I got was an unconvincing mess of a film that was, at the best, clichéd to the point that it was laughable, and at the worst, more pretentious than your average Mac owner.  It appears that Chapman (writer/director) has written the script with a copy of The God Delusion at his side, and simply shoe-horned each argument into his plot. Whilst this is not necessarily enough to make the film shit, Chapman solved that problem by injecting his movie full of the over-dramatic cheese that only Americans seem to be capable of.

An example of this? Well, The Ledge has its damsel-in-distress in the form of Liv Tyler’s character Shana, a devoutly religious woman who is married to the worst kind of alpha-male—the one that has received a higher calling from Yaweh himself. Why is Shana religious? Because she used to be a prostitute and one of her johns had a church fetish: he liked to have sex prostitutes inside churches and then beat them up. This is no joke folks, Liv Tyler tells us so in the second act. When she says it, the first thing I wondered was how the hell you have sex inside a church without anyone noticing. The second thing I wondered was just how obvious the whole backstory was. This is the kind of writing you’d expect from a tenth grade emo kid’s creative writing assessment. The kind the teacher probably laughed at, but ultimately gave an A+ because all the other kids wrote about what they did in the summer break.

Another problem I had was that none of the characters were likeable. Indeed if film is a dessert that we enjoy after the main course that is our daily life, then The Ledge is arse-hole pie. The atheist protagonist makes it his mission to seduce Shana just because he feels like he needs to liberate her from the puritanical leash of her husband, not because he likes her or anything, just to make a patronising point. Indeed women should be mad at Shana’s characterisation here. She’s basically a fuck-puppet that gets passed from one douche-bag to another douche-bag without so much as complaining about her role in the warped power play. Of course, it’s okay to have unlikeable characters in film. There Will Be Blood had a bastard of a protag, and it’s one of the greatest films ever made. The characters that inhabit The Ledge just aren’t developed well enough. A few of them achieve character arcs, but they are uninteresting and utterly contrived. I think it took two scenes of Terrence Howard’s whole rocky family situation before I just didn’t give a shit anymore.

And the ending sucked. I won’t give it away and spoil it for those out there that want to see it, but suffice to say Terrence Howard has what is quite possibly the most retarded Eureka! moment ever recorded on film.

One star: