A Long Way Down

Nick Hornby has had a run of good luck when it comes to adaptations of his works, with High Fidelity, About A Boy and even Fever Pitch ranging from decent to really quite good, so chances were good that the trend would continue. A director with potential? Check. A great cast? Check. A kooky and timely plot? Check. Lots of funny jokes and poignant moments? Uhm... Not so much.

Its New Year's Eve, and Pierce Brosnan is playing a disgraced TV presenter who is on top of a very tall building in London and about to jump off. However, he finds he's not alone up there, and we promptly get introduced to Toni Collette's struggling single mother of a handicapped son, Imogen Poots' distraught and heartbroken party-girl and Aaron Paul's deep and depressed loner. They get to talking and make a pact not to kill themselves before Valentine’s Day, using each other as a support group.

Making a comedy about suicide was always going to be a tricky balancing act, and while Hornby may have managed to stick his landing (so to speak) in the novel, the same can't be said for the adapted screenplay. Veering madly between inappropriate, almost slap-stick comedy, then to scenes of overwrought emotions, with barely a pause for breath in between, there is no sense of even tone, no real sense of rhythm to proceedings. This bit is funny, you should laugh now, this bit is sad, you should cry now, but without the leg-work of actually making us care about the characters we're laughing or crying with.

Thankfully the cast do more than their fair share, with all four leads doing their best, with some solid support from Rosamund Pike as Brosnan's former TV co-anchor, and Sam Neill as Poots' politician father. But they do their best work whenever the film takes a second to stop mugging around and have a legitimate moment of real-ness, which are too few and too far between.

By far the worst Hornby adaptation, and between this and Need For Speed, Aaron Paul really needs to have a better quality detector before he just becomes known as 'that guy who acted with Bryan Cranston'.