The Walk

This story has already been told to great satisfaction in the magical 2008 documentary Man on Wire.

In 1974, French tightrope walker Philippe Petit and a loose gang of accomplices secretly slung a wire across the just-completed World Trade Center in New York, and Petit walked the void between the Twin Towers for nearly an hour. This story has already been told to great satisfaction in the magical 2008 documentary Man on Wire, and Robert Zemeckis' uneven biopic The Walk just runs its needle over the same narrative grooves. The Walk exists only to get to the Twin Towers sequence, where the technical mastery of Zemeckis and his special effects team takes over. That vertiginous, nearly real-time tightrope sequence is certainly lucid and entrancing, especially on an IMAX screen, but Zemeckis spends 90 minutes grasping at straws to get us there. Zemeckis leans heavily on the charm and physicality of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, overnarrating straight-to-camera as Petit, but his Pepe Le Pew accent wears down any goodwill. D.B.