The Loft (Karl Urban, James Marsden)

[Holmes]

My review -

A complete dud, The Loft is fashioned as an old-school, ultra-twisty erotic suspense film, but it contains neither genuine suspense nor a single particularly arousing scene. Its ineptitude is almost astounding. The story turns on five wealthy male friends, played by the capable-but-squandered quintet of Karl Urban, James Marsden, Wentworth Miller, Eric Stonestreet, and Matthias Schoenaerts, who share the title space: it is their mischievous and secret home away from home (and their wives), the perfect place to romance their girlfriends without the subsequent race to hide suspicious hotel charges on credit-card statements. One morning, however, they discover an unknown woman dead in the bed in the loft, her wrist slashed and her corpse encircled with pills, and the friends begin to suspect and turn against one another: who was there last? Who is the culprit? Is one trying to frame the others?

The film is defined by a dull, unproductive misanthropy: it embraces the fact its central characters are destructive, entitled, louche, and self-absorbed cads (one is obese, one is slightly more sensitive than the others, another slightly angrier and more volatile, but they are otherwise hard to distinguish), but their bad behavior is never engaging or fun. Their Law & Order-style plight, presented via an interrogation-room framing device, becomes downright laborious as an absurd amount of clues, coincidences, and incidents collide with a flagrant disregard for continuity and internal logic. The film has no momentum, no panache. Only cold, dead, heavy, overbearing plot, plot, plot. The wildly contrived architecture of the solution to the mystery of the dead woman would be infuriating if one had not tuned out long before it is belatedly unveiled.

F