Category: lies

Please don’t waste your time watching Man on a Ledge

The cover is actually the best thing about the film

Lovefilm recently sent me the film ‘Man On A Ledge.’ I don’t recall ever adding it to my rental list and now I am beginning to suspect that someone who dislikes me hacked into my account and added it on there.

The first time the disc came through, it was unplayable. I should have taken this as sign. Instead, I returned it to them with a note advising them of this and they sent me another copy above my rental allowance which was nice of them.

I watched the film last Sunday and it was one hour and forty two minutes of my life that I am never getting back so I thought I would write this to prevent anyone else wasting their time watching this piece of drivel.

To give you an idea of why you might be suckered into watching this, here are a few excepts from reviews on Lovefilm:

“This clever thriller takes you on an entertaining ride and isn’t all it seems to be.”
“Intriguing thriller”
“This film, with a solid cast and a decent script, is original, intriguing, fast-paced and genuinely entertaining. I really, really enjoyed it.”
“Such a clever thought out plot!! no dull moments, a very good, gripping film, really enjoyed it. Would even watch it again”

All of these, coupled with an average rating of three and a half stars is probably enough to convince you to watch it.
The trouble is, it’s all a bunch of lies from a bunch of lying liars. If you genuinely haven’t been put off by my rants so far, I should warn you that the next paragraph will contain spoilers. Ok, here is the plot of the film:

A man is imprisoned for stealing a diamond that was never actually stolen. He escapes whilst attending his brother’s funeral and stands on the ledge of a hotel room threatening to jump using the media circus as a distraction whilst his brother and his girlfriend (who predictably become his fiancée in the final scene of the film) break into the building next door 

That’s it. Ok, there are other things happening as well, but I don’t think that counts as being “a clever thought out plot.” Seriously, I could get a bunch of eight-year olds to write a film and it would be more exciting. 

I don’t ever remember watching a film where I cared so little about every single character. None of them had anything interesting about them or were portrayed with any sort of empathy.

Then the script… the dialogue is so poor, it is almost as if the person who is writing it has never had an actual conversation in their life and had to guess at what people say in conversations.

And the acting is so so so horrendous. When I was 11, I played King Herod in my school’s nativity. My evil laugh was so poor that the audience laughed at it. In comparison to the actors in this film, however, that was a performance of De Niro or Pacino standards. 

The really frustrating thing is that I can’t stop watching something. I’m a bit OCD and when I start something, I have to finish it. I don’t know why but I do. So, after realising about 2 minutes into the film that it was going to be dull as dishwater, I knew I had a further 100 minutes of torture to endue.


I cannot stress enough how bad this film is. This has beaten You Got Served which I once forced Lewis to watch (possibly as punishment) when we were both off sick from work one day. I think by the end of that film, we were both ready to call into our respective offices and tell them that we’d had a miraculous recovery and were on our way in.

This film was so bad that it left me wishing that I was the one up on the ledge so that I could jump and end the torture.