When I first saw the previews for Man on a Ledge late last year, I have to admit that it looked like a modern day shot at an overplayed concept. I wondered how a whole movie could be made out of a man standing on a ledge. It wasn’t until I actually saw the movie that I understood.

Ex-cop Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) is incarcerated for stealing a diamond worth millions of dollars from a man he was working for on the side of his police job. The story takes off when he coordinates a prison break and goes up onto the ledge of the twenty-first floor of a hotel owned by the man who framed him. He then rallies to get as much media and police attention from the ledge as he can, while his brother Joey (Jamie Bell) and Joey’s girlfriend Angie (Genesis Rodriguez) try to find the diamond in question.

The story moves very fast after that point. Nick gets police psychologist Lydia Mercer (Elizabeth Banks) to believe that he is an innocent man. She is able to hold off a bunch of officers who may or may not be dirty cops while Nick gets his “retrial.”

An interesting fact about the movie is that most of the ledge scenes were not filmed on the ground and then superimposed onto a building. Worthington (Avatar, Clash of the Titans, Terminator Salvation) filmed the majority of the movie 225 feet off the ground, according to Monsters and Critics. That makes the film even cooler, because Nick Cassidy’s fear at the possibility of actually falling to his death was Worthington’s real fear while filming. Worthington undoubtedly had safety harnesses and whatnot, but that kind of height would still be scary.

Man on a Ledge definitely pleasantly surprised me. For fans of police procedurals, it’s a definite must see.