The Twin Towers will always be in our collective memory because of the events in 2001. The buildings were an iconic part of the skyline of New York and it is still weird to not see them when you’ve seen them in so many movies and TV shows in the past. Still they were also the place where in the seventies one man wanted to realise a dream. That man was Philippe Petit from France (played here by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and he wanted to his high wire act between the to buildings.
In order to realise that though he wasn’t planning to ask for a permit to do so. He wanted to secretly execute it and that meant setting up a huge plan in order to realise it and getting together a trustworthy team around him in order to be able to infiltrate the towers and set up the wire.
The Walk is narrated by Levitt from the top of a CGI generated Statue of Liberty, who doesn’t only talk about the events that took place in New York, but also how he got there, how his dream took shape. It is a way of telling a story which I wasn’t a fan of as it keeps pulling you out of the story.
Besides that I had a much bigger issue with this movie and that is the fact that I watched the documentary Man on Wire a couple of years ago. In that film the real Petite talks about his experiences and those are enacted (just like happens here). The man is an excellent storyteller and I was on the edge of my seat. That documentary felt like an exciting heist movie. Of course that created expectations about The Walk as you already know what is about to happen. Unfortunately The Walk doesn’t manage to reach the same level in any way. The pictures of the actual walk did more to me than the CGI created environment which doesn’t look real at all. If you want to experience this story than you should just watch Man on Wire and only check this one out if you can’t do without that “Hollywood sauce” on top of it.
It’s hard to live up to Man on Wire, but I really enjoyed The Walk. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is so charismatic, I thought he really made the film work.
Somehow he didn’t manage to convince me here…
You know what? I’m actually gonna agree with you on this one – I just didn’t think the characters were that well developed. It was all about the “walk” and Petit’s desire to get up onto the buildings, but his relationship felt sketchy and the ensemble of supporting characters (with the exception of Ben Kingsley) was pretty below-par.
Yeah, it never impressed me and everything felt too one dimensional… Ben Kingsley was good, but only had a small role.