Metacritic reviews

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.

Clichés 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.

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.

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.

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.

Man 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.

Trusting 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.

The 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.

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.