Man on a Ledge

Let be start by saying that I had set high hopes for this movie after I saw the trailer. Looked very Phone Booth type of a scenario with some extra action on the side. Turned out, only thing in common was the fact that the events were focused on a certain area of the city, I wanted more though.

So on the context of the idea, the movie would have been rather brilliant IF they had done it a lot differently! I am not an expert, far from it, but the problem I had with Man on a Ledge was that it didn’t fit the thriller part. Seriously, IMDb has categorized it as a thriller for the obvious reason of having just one explosion and few moments of danger for the main character which is far from an action movie scenario. But a thriller, I am going smart-ass for a moment and quote Wikipedia: “Thriller is a broad genre of literature, film, and television programming that uses suspense, tension and excitement as the main elements.¹” So, we’re supposed to have the three underlined feelings during a thriller, I had none of them after the event of showing who the main character was. Seriously, a strange man walks onto the ledge, about to jump, is a great idea – but then, right in the beginning showing all the back story of how he got there is far from exciting. It doesn’t create tension, it takes it away and the only suspense that I got was the scene with Jamie Bell and the hot girl almost getting caught.

Another interesting fact, the most successful thriller world wide so far has been The Da Vinci Code – what are the key elements of that movie/book. Not knowing who the bad guy is! Man on a Ledge kind of gave everything away, it seemed that they played their cards all at once and hoped we’d be still interested in playing the game. So it definitely doesn’t work as a thriller but could it shadow itself as crime? My opinion, NO,  if I had anything to say about it. Because if you take a person who is for instance a big fan of Criminal Minds, who is me, and saw its two episode season finale, you would say that “THAT WAS CRIME!” because it was brilliant! (I am going to do a short review on it as well, so get your crime-face on.) The big difference between the latter and the former was logic and continuity. Man on a Ledge had a very low element of logic while the story itself was all over the place.

But not all was bad, the most rewarding for me was Jamie Bell, who was just good to look at, I mean at least he had the decency to cut his hair to look camera friendly. On the other hand, the idea of a man on a ledge still stays appealing for me, just the way this was written, directed and acted was very disappointing.