Summit Entertainment
102 min., dir. by Asger Leth, with Sam Worthington, Elizabeth Banks, and Ed Harris

Last year, I wrote a fairly scathing review of Battle: L.A. Not too long after, I suffered through the pain of Sucker Punch, opening my review with an apology to Battle: L.A. The same phenomenon has struck again as Man on a Ledge: no suspense, wasted talent, and a plot more translucent than plastic wrap.

Nick Cassidy (Sam Worthington) is a disgraced cop who’s imprisoned for a crime of which he claims innocence. After breaking out, he heads to Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel, books a room under a false identity, eats some lobster and french fries chased with champagne (a top notch combo), and then heads out onto the ledge. On the ledge for about a mere 10 seconds an old woman spots Cassidy and draws gawking crowds and police to the situation. Cassidy has one request: to speak with Detective Lydia Mercer.

Why Mercer? Will he jump? Is he innocent?

Those are several of the questions Man on a Ledge hopes you would ask, but instead the only question I had was, “When will this end?” The cavalcade of characters are all written as typical thriller stereotypes, with thinly veiled motives. No words need to come out of their mouths for the audience to realize what role they play in the story and where they’ll end up.

The bumbling duo of Jamie Bell and Genesis Rodriguez as the comic relief felt awkward and misplaced. Their sickening back-and-forth diatribe brought up more questions of inconsistency than humor; mere dialogue for dialogue’s sake that contradicts the entire movie. Meanwhile, they commit some of the most grating movie mistakes of all time — at one point, Rodriguez’s character crawls into an air-duct at knee level. The duct is literally adjacent to the room she is breaking into, yet she pops out of the ceiling. The whole thing is highly offensive and outright disrespectful to the audience’s intelligence.

With less to offer the viewing public than your typical thriller, Man on a Ledge fails at every turn. It takes an already worn-out formula and throws it at a blank canvas and hopes something good sticks, yet even the overstuffed cast can’t do a single thing to make seeing Man on a Ledge worthwhile.

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Matthew Schuchman is the founder and film critic of Movie Reviews From Gene Shalit’s Moustache and also the contributing film writer for IPaintMyMind.