Critic Reviews

Life on the Line traffics in piled-on, predictable melodrama, with only intermittent sparks.

This is one of those “based on true events” movies that give you the distinct feeling that the true events deserved better.

Director David Hackl’s Life on the Line is supposed to be a moving story about men working electrical lines. Viewers, however, might require a high-voltage shock just to endure it.

The country songs that play over the credits offer more arresting detail about life on the line than the film manages in 100 minutes.

Concerned with both physical and psychological hazards of the job, Life on the Line manufactures a pileup of looming disasters to which director David Hackl lends no cadence.

The narrative is so predictable that, when an outburst of trash-talking doesn’t escalate into a barroom brawl, it’s not just surprising, it’s pretty close to shocking.

For a film about such a singular profession, Life on the Line offers surprisingly little insight into linemen's day-to-day labor.

The slumming stars actually make the situation worse for everyone; Life On The Line plays like an ego trip without any accompanying fun.

Underappreciated occupations deserve better than the cliché-clogged, utterly predictable Life on the Line, a terrible movie about the workers who keep the electrical grid functioning.

A listless cast and a crushingly flat script fail to illuminate the lives of high-wire electrical workers in Life on the Line, which instead resorts to tired story beats and a false sense of self-righteousness.