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75Man on a Ledge doesn't aim high, but what it aims to do, it does. It grabs the audience's attention, engages its anxieties, stokes its resentments and, at the finish, sends people out saying, "That was good."
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Jan 26, 201270Leth moves lightly and briskly, streamlining the weird material into something elemental and true; he's also assembled a knockout supporting cast.
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65Either in spite of or because of its whimsically convincing quality, Man on a Ledge is reasonably fun to watch along the way.
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63On 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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60The 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.
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60It's fun in a perverse way; the viewer gets to experience a vivid sense of what it feels like to occupy a pigeon-poop smeared piece of stone high in the sky.
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60Clichés and thin thrillers are what we can expect from January releases and while Man on a Ledge has predictability to spare, it also has something that makes your time spent worthwhile: legitimate suspense.
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50As in the mindless Man on a Ledge, the hero is never really in danger, we're the ones who are trapped.
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50As ridiculous as it is, Man on a Ledge isn't a movie that requires suspension of disbelief. It requires the absolute absence of it.
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Jan 27, 201250The film aims for Hitchcock and gets a bit turned around; we're The Audience That Knew Too Much.
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50None of it rings true, except perhaps the presence of an ambitious local TV news reporter (Kyra Sedgwick) who begins recording every macabre moment with relish.
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50In 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.
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50The supporting players in Man on a Ledge bring more to the party than the leads, and my suspension of disbelief seems to have gotten hung up in traffic while attempting to cross the suspension-of-disbelief bridge from the Brooklyn side.
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50The 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.
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Jan 25, 201250Despite 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.
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50To 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.
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50This 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.
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42Man on a Ledge makes bigger leaps of logic than Nick will if he fails a gravity test. If the transparent sting springing him from Sing Sing doesn't roll your eyes, then wait for the climax when Nick becomes a kind of plainclothes Spider-Man.
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40Screenwriter Pablo Fenjves start with a promising premise, and the opening scenes are taut and suspenseful. A late-day chase scene picks up the sagging middle, but Leth totally fumbles what should be the movie's biggest moment.
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40Too bad. You sense that someone could have made a good movie with this material. Unfortunately, Leth didn't.
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40In the end it's all much ado about not so much, a semifunctional thriller that tingles but never terrifies. Ledge schmedge.
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Jan 24, 201240Trusting an action drone like Worthington to anchor the human drama is a fatal mistake. With him perched on that narrow slab of concrete, it's only a matter of time before the film plummets.
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38Man on a Ledge has its diverting moments, but by the time it has reached its too-pat final twist, it turns out to be a title desperately in search of a movie.
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Jan 27, 201238What follows is a jumble of cop- and heist-movie clichés, dotted with appearances by actors you liked in something else.
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38More often the film succumbs to clichés, grows convoluted and outlandish, and winds up dead on arrival.
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38You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.
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38The script is a hot mess of the highest order, taking some of the stalest chestnuts in the long, venerated legacy of the framed-cop-trying-to-clear-his-name genre and somehow f---ing it up, in scene after scene after scene.
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33As the plot unfolds, brick by brick, the structure starts to wobble until it finally collapses into unintentional comedy.
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Jan 24, 201230Worthington 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.
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25The shopworn script by Pablo F. Fenjves, who ghost-wrote the unpublished O.J. Simpson book, If I Did It: The Confessions of the Killer, gets no help from director Asger Leth (Ghosts of Cite Soleil).
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25Man on a Ledge just made me think of an old Van Halen song: Jump.
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10Rarely has a film exhibited a bigger disconnect between urban realism and utter ludicrousness.
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- Release Date: Jun 27, 2007
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 8
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Mixed: 3 out of 8
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Negative: 2 out of 8
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