Caffeinated Clint
Releasing Robert Zemeckis’ latest the same month movie buffs toast to his best film was a miscalculated mistake. While film fans celebrate ‘Back to the Future’ day – a day named in honour of Marty McFly’s date of time-traveling seepage and the filmmaker’s beloved, and reputedly perfect trilogy – the veteran filmmaker attempts to convince audiences he’s still got what it takes when it comes to serving up visually stunning movies with fascinating, distinctive plotting. Though, as expected, visually spectacular (as are most of the filmmaker’s movies – see : ”Romancing the Stone”, ”Forrest Gump”, ”Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, even the recent ”Flight”, which encompassed one of the most realistically disturbing plane crash sequences in recent film history), Zemeckis’s ”The Walk” noticeably limps for most of its two-hour running time.
It isn’t until the film’s last 30-minutes or so that the biopic (on Philippe Petit, the subject of the acclaimed doco Man on the Wire ) really hits its stride, serving up a welcomingly exciting, breathtaking stunt that will have IMAX audiences both cheering and vomiting simultaneously.
Those moments are Zemeckis – and cinema – at his best; just as audiences were with Marty as he zipped around the space-time continuum, they’ll also be with as Petit (played nicely by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) walks a reedy rope between the late twin towers. Like a date where one has to suffer through a dull one-way conversation before finally getting to the muted fun, Zemeckis fails to put as much effort into the film’s non-walk moments, consequently serving up a laughable, breaking-the-fourth-wall narrative device (our lead character on top of the Statue of Liberty retelling his story, anyone?) and hammy how-he-got-here backstory that plays more like a SNL skit of Life of Beautiful than the relatable, enchanting prologue it should’ve. And yet, it’s followed up with some of the best cinema of the year – thrilling, breathtaking, sweat-inducing adventure. It’s hard to recommend people sit through an hour of nonsense just to see what a film’s third act has in store but I will suggest that here because that ‘walk’ really does look absolutely amazing.
DVD : (Extras Unpreviewed)
