Movie Review: The Loft (2014)

The Loft is a murder mystery with poor writing, terrible acting, obnoxious cinematography, and a soundtrack that thinks it’s in a better film. It tricks the unsuspecting by dangling Karl Urban and James Marsden as bait, and by the time viewers realize who the real villain is, about three minutes into the film, it’s already too late. Like a traffic accident, the rest of the disaster must be witnessed to satisfy our morbid curiosity.

The title refers to a loft shared by five friends, for secret dalliances with women who are not their wives. Their personalities are established through flashbacks: there’s the alpha, an ambitious architect (Urban); the fat one, who’s “funny” (Eric Stonestreet); the crazy violent criminal, as a red herring (Matthias Schoenaerts); the conscientious one (Marsden); and the repressed nerd (Wentworth Miller). A crime occurs in the loft, and the movie jumps back and forth between the police questioning, the friends’ initial reactions to the scene, and the moments leading up to the crime. OMG WHODUNIT???

Which leads us to the true answer: nobody cares.

Nobody curr, because:

The acting is awful—There’s a range of awfulness, too, from over-the-top (Schoenaerts) to scenery-chewing (Urban) to wooden (Miller). Marsden seems like he’s trying but wasn’t given much to work with, and I don’t think Stonestreet was acting at all.

The characters are gross—There’s no one to root for. All the main characters are douchey, all their wives are unpleasant, and the two other plot-crucial (-ish) women are bland. The only okay characters are the police detectives (Kristin Lehman and Robert Wisdom), and that’s only because they kept yelling “Bullshit!” (essentially) at the five guys during questioning.

The cinematography is painful—The crew seemed to think that dramatic swoops and intense close-ups would distract viewers from the morons onscreen. But they just made the experience worse.

The soundtrack deserves better—If you just listened to the film score, you’d think really exciting and suspenseful events were transpiring, instead of sad men and women making one dumb decision after another.

And the writing is bad, because if we don’t care about the characters, then we’re not invested in the “twist” or even the “reveal,” and definitely not in the “other twist.”

It’s like all the elements in the film combine to make everything as bad as possible, e.g. the dialogue becomes extra cheesy from being delivered with a B-movie grimace, while the camera is two centimeters from the actor’s face and the soundtrack is all, “This is thrilling!”

If this was intentional, then that is some fine trolling right there, cast and crew of The Loft.

In conclusion: UUUUGGGGGHHHHHHH. If it sounds like I'm harshing too much on this movie, it's because Eomer and Cyclops had earned my trust.

so betray
such crush
wow

TL;DR: Avoid The Loft. 

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