3.0
out of 100
Metascore®Mixed or average reviews Based on a weighted average of all critic review scores.
A sample of reviews from critics across the country.
On balance, Man on a Ledge is fun, but I left the theater feeling disappointed and cheated, as if the filmmakers set me up for something great they ultimately couldn't deliver.
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The ending, for instance, is so ridiculously tidy it squeaks. But en route to its kitchen-sink climax, "Man" manages to both amuse and provoke, to cleave to convention and promote ideas.
Despite the occasional dumb fun - especially with the heist portions - the leap of logic required to make it all work is enough to leave your brain pancaked on the sidewalk.
The movie cuts back and forth between two preposterous plot lines and uses the man on the ledge as a device to pump up the tension.
In Man on a Ledge, Leth does well in taking us to dizzying heights. If only he had found a way to ground that thrill in some real pathos as well.
This cloddishly contrived suspenser is too busy to bore, but too farfetched to thrill, combining routine heist-thriller machinations with dialogue that often thuds like a body hitting asphalt.
To his credit, director Asger Leth (Ghosts of Cite Soleil) gets right to the business at hand where the set-up is concerned, but it's in the execution that this would-be thriller falls flat.
More often the film succumbs to clichés, grows convoluted and outlandish, and winds up dead on arrival.
Worthington wouldn't know how to behave if the film were a comedy; and poor Banks, after a promising, "Young Adult"?style introduction, isn't allowed to goose the script or push beyond the glass ceiling of her character.
Rarely has a film exhibited a bigger disconnect between urban realism and utter ludicrousness.
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Movies.com Critic
Again and again and again and...
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Just jump already.
