Movie Review A Long Way Down

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Spoiler alerts – 2014 A very forced contrived comedy that treats suicidal urges as an excuse for farce. Pierce Brosnan plays a disgraced former TV presenter whose career is in ruins after his prison service over an affair with an under-age girl. Though he is presented as suave, charming and cynical, his sleazy background gives us little excuse to really like him. Brosnan’s Martin character decides to kill himself on New Year’s Eve and goes to the roof of a London skyscraper that is notorious as a place for suicidal people jumping off. He is shocked to find three other random would be jumpers joining him, and getting in the way. They are the neglected rebellious daughter of an MP, a middle-aged woman hoping her death will get her handicapped son better health-care than she can provide, and a young pizza-delivery guy who claims, falsely to be intent on killing himself for having cancer. He doesn’t actually know what really motivates his death-wish, which suggests that the writers didn’t understand him either. Any two such characters meeting by such chance might work for a movie, but four of them really stretches credibility beyond snapping point. The characters arbitrarily vow to try to stay alive until Valentine’s Day before trying to take their lives again, and start following one another around to make sure they stick to the promise. Their story hits the press so they head abroad for a holiday together, having only known one another for a month, to escape the attention (with the lady so worried about her handicapped son abandoning him to the care system so she can go). Imogen Poots‘s troubled teenager seems way too cheerful to make her despair seem credible while the hinted sub-plot about her missing sister is never resolved or fully explained. The humour is forced and while any of their stories might work as individual drama, trying to go with all four stories at once as comedy makes the whole thing impossible to accept. The film is based on a Nick Hornby novel. Arthur Chappell