Getting out of lease? apartment does not meet expectation?

a friend of mine recently looked at an apartment complex. the apartment they showed him was nice, it looked well taken care of and good. Where he was going to live was not available for viewing but needing an apartment and assuming it would meet the standards of the one that was shown to him, he signed a lease. when they gave him his key, the apartment he was to live in was revealed to be extremely substandard in comparison, unkempt, unmanageably peeling, bad odor, the whole gambit. He stated that he did not want to live there and the manager said that he had already signed the lease. Is there any way out of this? The manager has offered to repair the apartment at no cost but the time frame it will take to fix means he and his family would have to live rather uncomfortably.