Movie Review: 'The Walk'

How do you make a movie that tells the exact same story as an Oscar-winning documentary from just a few years ago, even based on the same source material? If you’re Robert Zemeckis, it’s by unleashing the powers of CGI, 3D and the IMAX format in the bravura closing sequence- and building a pretty good movie around it, too.

The Walk is the story of Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the French daredevil who, with the help of a few accomplices, walked between the two World Trade Center towers on a tightrope one morning in 1974. Based, as Man on Wire was, on Petit’s memoir To Reach the Clouds, The Walk takes the form of a caper film, with the team putting a plan together and carrying it out.

The film introduces us to Petit, through a shouldn’t-work-but-it-does-anyway framing device of Gordon-Levitt standing on top of the Statue of Liberty with the Towers behind him. He speaks of his upbringing in France and his circus apprenticeship under Ben Kingsley (doing yet another of his accents.) Eventually he acquires a group of accomplices both French and American, including a guitar-playing love interest (Charlotte Le Bon.)

With a few minor changes, the story follows Man on Wire. The biggest difference? The walk itself- which wasn’t actually filmed in real life and was depicted in the documentary via re-enactments- is here rendered in gorgeous splendor, especially if you see the film in IMAX (I would not recommend seeing it any other way.) It’s quite an achievement, nerve-wracking as hell even if you know the exact outcome. While some have complained of motion sickness, I saw none of that at my screening, although if fear of heights is an issue for you, this may be one to avoid.

The critical consensus from the early reviews is that while the actual walk sequence is amazing, the 80 minutes or so leading up to it is boring and/or ineffective. I disagree. I liked the whole movie, quite a bit.

The France scenes are straightforward but generally well done, and while the caper portion isn’t quite as exhilarating as, say, Ocean’s Eleven or Argo, it’s still quite enjoyable. Gordon-Levitt’s French accent is passable and Le Bon, as the love interest, reminded me of a young Winona Ryder. Of the crew, James Badge Dale stands out as an employee at a shady electronics store that helps them out.

Yes, things get silly at times. The film explains all these French people speaking English by having Petit state, out loud, three different times, that he wants them to feel like Americans. A moment involving a bird doesn’t look nearly as convincing as it should.

How do you handle the whole elephant-in-the-room of 9/11? Man on Wire opted to ignore it completely. The Walk, instead, not-so-subtly eludes to it various times. This is a bit much, but hey, at least it’s better than the last shot of Munich.

Those quibbles aside, The Walk is the first truly standout film of the fall, and best movie Zemeckis has made in many years,