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Before I sat down to write my review about the new thriller “The Loft” I was surprised to learn that this movie is a remake of a film that was hugely successful in Belgium back in 2008. The film also had a remake in the Netherlands in 2010. Lo and behold, the film’s director Erik van Looy not only directed the original, but also the Dutch adaptation. Instead, what is surprising is the fact that the same story has been retold three times in a span of 2 years. Take for example “The Maltese Falcon,” which was the last of a series of cinematic attempts at that story in less than a decade. I would have thought that by this third attempt at this specific narrative, all of the idiotic bits and implausible parts would have been removed. And, this long delayed erotic thriller really is a shabby bore that raises expectations for a number of thrilling stunts and then does absolutely nothing of the sort.
The movie follows five friends a smug architect named Vincent (Karl Urban), a good-hearted psychiatrist called Chris (James Marsden), a reserved and timid Luke (Wentworth Miller), a loud and crude womanizer named Marty (Eric Stonestreet), and a borderline lunatic, Philip (Matthias Schoenaerts) who happens to be Chris’s half-brother. Each one of these men is in a marriage that is fundamentally unsatisfactory for differing reasons. Let’s assume that each of these friends has an overwhelming desire to be unfaithful to their wives, but are too scared to do so out of fear of the consequences. In this case, Vincent comes up with a brilliant solution, “They will quietly purchase a new loft apartment in a building that I have designed out of the city and will use it for their rendezvous.” There are countless reasons to instantly dismiss such a suggestion as being idiotic, or highly impractical at best. However, instead of considering them, all of them agree to sign the proposal.
Everything seems to be working out fine, until, one horrifying morning when Luke arrives at the place only to find a strange corpse of a blonde women handcuffed to the bed with a wrist scarred beyond recognition. As shocking as this is, the bizarre only continues to unfold post further investigation. There are only five keys to the loft and so the only plausible explanation is that one of his friends had some sort of involvement with the girl’s death. This flashback reveals new information about the deceased woman’s identity and offers a hint at one of the guys being a potential murderer. The sequence unveils these men alongside their romantic partners and the twisted bonds they share among themselves. Moreover, the whole situation highlights them trying to figure out the truth, and which one of them is hiding something.
To put it another way, ‘The Loft’ is like a combination of ‘The Apartment’ but without the sharp humor and compelling characters, ‘Reservoir Dogs’ but lacking the enticing sexual overtones and an episode of ‘Law & Order SVU’ that is not so good. Guess what? That description now makes it sound much more appealing than it really is. I have never watched the first two versions so I do not know how this one stacks up against them, but either something got badly mangled in translation or the Belgians and Dutch are way too soft on terrible thrillers. The plot itself is a broken record, a tapestry of time travel that seems random and disorganized. It tries to be clever, but trust me, it’s never as close as it thinks it is. Screenwriter Wesley Strick completely drops the ball here dahil his dialogue is boring, his characters are two-dimensional, and all the characters are unpleasant and irritating, and his attempts to tie up all the plot lines is just laughable.
As for van Looy (whose thriller from 2003, “The Memory of a Killer” is as good as this one is bad), he seems to be on autopilot the entire time, most likely due to boredom since there is not a single breathtaking moment to witness. For the most part, the actors are also just phoning it in and do not seem to be putting any effort or enthusiasm at all. The one exception to this is Eric Stonestreet, who appears to be so giddy at the idea of being able to play someone completely different from his character on “Modern Family” that he has begun overacting in every single scene, to the point where every time he steps on the screen, you may unconsciously recoil. Regarding the women, they are largely shown throughout as nymphomaniac witches, and the film’s final stance towards them can perhaps be inferred from the fact that the two main actresses Taylor and Isabel Lucas are castoffs from the “Transformers” series.
“The Loft” is a movie that looks like it was made to be played in vacant cinema halls during the month of January. The movie fails as a thriller. It is blundrous and too basic to work as a murder mystery. There are no pretentious evaluations of masculine violence which could prop it up as drama and its eroticism is so scant that only people who consider HGTV to be smut would get turned on. Arguably the most redeeming feature about it is that it is so completely disposable that it will be forgotten almost instantly and all parties concerned can move on to whatever else they were doing.
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