5 Flights Up - C

Rated PG-13, 92 minutes
Wes's Grade: C

Thinly amusing dramedy "5 Flights Up" has a great offer but still disappoints

If you've ever had to sell your home and buy a new place, it can be quite an adventure (just getting financed these days can be challenging), and the well-acted but thin, somewhat joyless dramedy "5 Flights Up" explores just that. Forty years ago, artist Alex (Morgan Freeman) bought a run-down apartment in a sketchy part of Brooklyn with his wife, schoolteacher Ruth (Diane Keaton). Today, their neighborhood is now very hip and their apartment worth a small fortune. Well-cast and mildly amusing, "5 Flights Up" makes an initial great offer but has a disappointing follow-through. Directed by Richard Loncraine ("My One and Only") and written by Charlie Peters, based on the novel "Heroic Measures" by Jill Ciment, it certainly has a pedigreed director and two Oscar-winning actors in the lead roles, who do their best with the rambling script that relies heavily on flashbacks in telling the couple's backstory. As good as actors as Freeman and Keaton are, they aren't as believeable or interesting as their younger selves, played by Claire van der Boom and Korey Peters, and the present day is filled with too many minor characters who are distractions, though Cynthia Nixon has some fun as their real-estate agent niece, who'll do almost anything to get their apartment sold at a great price. You can certainly sense her character's frustration with the older pair in the unsatisfying climax, which has them doing very little in terms of making any real changes, which makes you wonder they the film spent so much time with them in the first place. "5 Flights Up" has some great things to offer, a great cast, a lovable pooch who steals scenes from two Oscar-winners (and whose subplot takes up a great deal of this movie), but ultimately the deal falls through. A disappointment considering the cast.