Man on a Ledge: Critic Reviews

Man on a Ledge is the kind of movie where you need to check your brain at the door and enjoy a brief respite from reality.

For a film with such a straightforward title, Man on a Ledge turns out to be remarkably convoluted.

A movie that doesn't realize that it should have been a comedy.

The ledge gives Worthington a run for his money. The giddy thrill of the story - perched high above the milling genre stereotypes - was grounded long ago.

The film succumbs to cliches, grows convoluted and outlandish, and winds up dead on arrival.

It sure is about a man on a ledge.

The movie doesn't give an audience anything that makes sense. How does Harris smoke a cigar that appears to weigh more than he does? And whence is Worthington's accent?

With his pickled shark's smile, Harris is a welcome presence left with regrettably little to do.

Like Cassidy, Leth never quite knows whether to jump or stand firm. Too often, he just winds up wobbling in the wind.

En route to its kitchen-sink climax, "Man" manages to both amuse and provoke, to cleave to convention and promote ideas.

"Man on a Ledge" isn't a caper comedy. It's a heist picture, a thriller -- and a not-that-thrilling one at that. But the folks who made it have enough of a sense of humor to get how silly it is and run with that on occasion.

"...it didn't entirely suck but sort of just petered out..."

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.

You can say this for screenwriter Pablo F. Fenjves' story: It stays busy.

This noirish thriller is as self-knowingly ludicrous and thoroughly enjoyable as Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt or While the City Sleeps.

The solution to "now what do we do for 103 minutes?" is to pile as many silly distractions into the running time as possible.

There's no escaping the sheer terror of a guy standing on a ledge that high up. "Man on a Ledge" delivers the sweats it intends to deliver.

You sense that someone could have made a good movie with this material. Unfortunately, Leth didn't.

This cloddishly contrived suspenser is too busy to bore, but too farfetched to thrill.

[A] jumble of cop- and heist-movie cliches, dotted with appearances by actors you liked in something else...

Nobody should be this hard up for entertainment.

Dumb, easy-to-swallow fun, more or less - the sort of movie that makes people say, "Well, that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be."

Credibility takes a nose-dive long before its protagonist is separated from his perch.

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.

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.