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

[Britnasty]

I, for one, found this to be quite enjoyable. 3/5.

It's not the best movie by any means but it is highly entertaining up until the very end. (The final twist is actually great; I never saw it coming and I can figure out twists pretty early on usually)

[Rodney-2187]

Great cast. Worth watching.

[CelluloidPal]

I totally forgot this movie even existed. But the OP's assessment of this film is spot on.
Why should I even care what happens to a bunch of self absorbed, entitled, cheating D-bags?
The cast was rock solid but it was all for not.

[esteban²]

Loft (2008), the original version, is one of the best thrillers Belgium has to offer. (IMDB 7.4 - RT (audience) 79%) From the writing to editing and directing, it's all pretty great. Especially the acting, some of our finest actors brought together here. Everyone who hasn't seen the remake (cause then it's ruined), should check it out. Do not confuse it with the Dutch (Netherlands) remake (2010), that one is not on the same level. Not at all. Far from.

But what went wrong with the American remake of Loft?

Director Erik Van Looy (both original and US remake), sometimes called the 'Flemish Michael Mann' when talking about the atmosphere and look of his movies, says that one mistake was made for sure. A lot of the original dialogue was literally translated and looking back, it just didn't work, 'lost in translation', kinda. It should have been re-written by American writers when it comes to that aspect.

Also, not that there's anything wrong with the American cast, they are good at their job, no doubt. But in comparison with the status the original cast has overhere, to be on that level, this should have been a A-list starring movie that would make your jaw drop. Again, the US actors are fine, but they just aren't lifting up the movie like was the case in the 2008 version. Matthias Schoenaerts (not even the best of the Flemish bunch) was the only one who stayed for the Hollywood take on it, thanks to Van Looy. But the others were kinda forced by the studio. These were the ones they could pay. Not the best choices, imo, knowing the original characters.

Writer Bart De Pauw, a briljant TV-maker, wrote 'Loft' with specific actors in his mind. And they got the actors they wanted. Funny detail, one of the characters was written with Matt Damon in the back of his mind as the American version, just in case ... But De Pauw had nothing to say about the US version, he wasn't involved.

He did share his vision about what went wrong with the remake and why most people didn't like it and why it's just not working on some levels. And I agree, my thoughts exactly, he hit the nail on the head:

He used the wedding scene where one guy put the keys for the loft on the table. In the orginal version everybody reacts like most humans would do. Shocked, a bit embarassed, uneasy and full of doubt. They go through different stages before they actually take one. It shows human beings, having different feelings about it. In the US remake, it basically comes down to the guy offering the keys and everybody going "Yeah! héhéhé!", all putting up an "evil" smile. It killed every form of empathy or even sympathie for those characters. It simply changed them into a$$holes. All the subtile questions about what it does to a human mind to cheat on your mind, was nowhere to be found in the American remake. The original was more like a psychological game too, the US version not at all. They dumbed it down and it changed the tone completely. There was no depth. Or at least not at the same level.

It's amazing how two movies that are actually the same, can be so different when attention to detail is gone.