2/10

Director Erik Van Looy takes the helm of the 2011 original Sweedish film titled “Loft”. In the remake, Karl Urban and James Marsden star in the story of five guys who conspire to secretly share a penthouse loft in the city–a place where they can indulge in their deepest fantasies. But the fantasy becomes a nightmare when they discover the dead body of an unknown woman in the loft, and they realize one of the group must be involved. Paranoia seizes them as everyone begins to suspect one another. Friendships are tested,  loyalties are questioned and marriages crumble as one bombshell after another drops. Not many things can be said in the positive department for “The Loft”. It currently holds a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, but i think the film is a little better deserving than that. There is a slight feel of a Hitchcock thriller hiding deep below the surface. Looy takes a script full of swerves, but many of them are painfully obvious for a dedicated viewer during the first act. This movie shows pieces of the ending to kick off the film. The problem with this in any movie, is that you know the subtle clues to look for when figuring it all out. For instance, there is a man laying on a car dead for the film’s first shot. We notice he has on gloves, and you only have to keep that in mind when thinking where the ending direction of this film is headed. Many of the surprises are like that. I found myself accurately predicting about 80% of the big twists in this movie, with the other 20% being completely unnecessary. These twists themselves are so hard to believe to anyone with even half of a brain to understand how impossible it would be for these characters to be in these places in the given explanations. On the subject of the acting/character work, that is the true weakness of the film. Marsden and Urban try their hardest with script dialogue that feels like something out of a Lifetime Network TV show. In fact, this whole movie feels like three thinly stretched half hour episodes of a hip young adult drama. The repetitive monotonous tones of the score play slowly and reach higher lengths right as we find out a big bombshell that feels like the end of an episode. It never feels like a movie because it’s a story that lacks total structure. Nothing is ever built for the long term to let the viewer truly soak every new piece of information in. Instead, we are given the next bombshell dropped before we can ever enjoy the last one. The film had good pacing during the first act, but i feel like there are too many things to reveal in the second and third to make it feel overcrowded. It was great to see Prison Break’s Wentworth Miller in an eye opening role even if the film is garbage. His work in the movie is among the very few bright spots i took away from it. The biggest problem with the men around Miller is the inability to believe that these guys were ever friends in the first place. Modern Family’s Eric Stonestreet is one of the friends in the groups, and he spouts these awful lines that are so degrading to women that even the most dedicated of groups would have trouble considering this guy for a spot in their wedding. Maybe his spot is acceptable because every single one of these five protagonists (if you can call them that) are pigheaded and lack a single redeeming quality to ever make you care about them. I feel like this film has done for men what Gone Girl has done for women. If you are on a date night, i would steer clear of this one. Overall, “The Loft” is as bizarre as it is silly. It’s storytelling is as subtle as an atom bomb drop in a highly populated city. It’s unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, and there is nothing “Must See” about that.