About 5 Flights Up, the Rotten Tomatoes "consensus" says the following:
“5 Flights Up is a bit of a narrative fixer-upper, but when it comes to watching Diane Keaton and Morgan Freeman share screen time, you really can't beat the view.”
I disagree with that second part. You can absolutely beat the view. Two legendary actors giving phoned-in and disinterested performances just ain’t an arresting sight. I don't blame actors for taking paychecks, so please don't take this statement as a moral judgment, but there are actors out there who will gladly work as little as their project demands - this includes both of the leads in this soggy garbage bag of a film.
It's not their fault the movie is bad, and stellar performances would do little to help a film with such a meandering plot. Transitions are jarring, characters are constantly saying and doing things which seem to be based on information we're never informed that they have (almost as if an omniscient narrator had supplied that information between dialogue but it had simply been cut), and oftentimes actors deliver several lines in rapid succession which are disjunct enough in meaning that there really ought to have been a pause. Worst is when a character has several lines in a row, each of which are directed at different characters, but the speaker never takes their eyes from the first recipient.
And that’s just scratching the surface. It's difficult to explain why this film is so unpleasant, jarring, and incredible (not in the sense that it is grand, but in the sense that nothing is credible - even the most mundane things in the movie aren't believable or lifelike). The film is somehow less than the sum of its faulty and broken parts.
Back to my first point: when I say that some actors always put in 100% even for the worst projects they work on, please remember that I'm not judging actors who don’t. Instead, I'm identifying a quality in folks like Nick Cage and Sam Jackson - that their films are worth the price of admission even when disastrously bad. They deliver absurd amounts of entertainment factor through their wild performances.
If the leads in 5 Flights Up had that same quality, it might have been worth watching despite its flaws. Unfortunately, they’re clearly not even trying, and I've got to warn you to stay away from this film unless there's some kinda $1,000,000 prize attached to its viewing. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
Plot: 0
Characters: 2
Themes: 0
Spectacle: 0
Overall score: The Room, except boring instead of funny.
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