SummaryFive married friends conspire to secretly share a penthouse loft in the city—a place where they can carry out hidden affairs and 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...
SummaryFive married friends conspire to secretly share a penthouse loft in the city—a place where they can carry out hidden affairs and 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...
Everyone seems to hate this movie and I can kind of understand why but to me this was a cool, sexy, twisty and entertaining thriller. I do actually genuinely like this movie. The plot follows five married guys who invest in a loft so they can take their mistresses their and then one day they walk in and find a dead body and they must find out who did it. now none of these characters are necessarily likable but the performances behind them are pretty good. Karl Urban is great as per-usual, James Marsden is a stand out and gives the best performance in the entire movie, Matthias Schoenaerts is also very good reprising his role from the Belgium film, Eric Stonestreet is serviceable to his role but not really all that good and Wentworth Miller is just plain awful and awkward in his role. Rachel Taylor is quite surprisingly good as one of the mistresses and Isabel Lucas is really hot (she sheds a lot of skin and it is kind of awesome) and has definitely improved on her acting skills. While the film is very confusing and takes a little too many twists here and there, I did enjoy the unraveling and the motives, it kept me guessing until the end. My biggest issue with the movie is its ending it just felt a little too nice for how dark and serious the movie is. In the end I found this to be a very entertaining movie that I would go back and watch again because of its ensemble and its fun plot. I know it has a 0% on rotten tomatoes and everyone seems to be hating it but I really like and I give "The Loft" an A-. It is now in my list of guilty movie pleasures and underappreciated movies.
Grade: A-
Rated R, 104 min. Open Road Films
The film's mystery is obvious and predictable but there is a twist on top, the script is terrible the writer of the other remakes in 2008 and 2010 Bart De Pauw and Wesley Strick script is laughable the romance is corny and their mystery is well done. You have talented actors so why are they in this film? It's the script that makes them terrible. We have two remakes that should not been made. The director of the original Erik Van Looy returns with more and more **** directing. The film gives us clues and good suspense the way we look at Karl Urban, James Marsden, Chris Vanowen, Wentworth Miller, Matthias Schoenaerts. The women in the film are terribly written; the film represents women as a **** of cliche's. But the film has a Hitchcock thriller and times it can be great it's gripping. Grade C+
For the most part, The Loft struggles to engage even on the level of tawdry potboiler, joining the forgettable ranks of 2005’s "Derailed" and 2008’s "Deception" as yet another underwhelming one-night stand.
The Loft's boorish leads aren't sensible enough to be worth caring about, making the film's character-driven conclusion feel like a self-defeating cop-out.
This long-delayed would-be erotic thriller is a shabby bore that promises viewers any number of kinky thrills and then proceeds to deflate those expectations.
All the men's wives are shrews, prigs or doormats; all the conquests doe-eyed blonds with sucked-in cheeks. All the dialogue is as witty as this exchange: "You're a sick f---!" "No, you're a sick f---!" They're all sick f---s, frankly, and the actors are dreadful while playing them.
I completely disagree with the American press. This movie is phenomenal! It’s about 5 guys sharing a loft where they can bring their mistresses and eventually end up involved in an investigation that could land them all in jail. The movie has a very strong story that underlines the plot where it is going. This genre of erotic thriller is difficult in some parts of America. That is why the Belgian Director Erik Van Looy decided not to organize a press vision in advance. Perhaps he should just have done that given their pulverizing and ridicilous reviews. Apparently the American press has less difficulty with someone shooting forty men down than with five men who cheat!! The theme of premeditated adultery caused bad blood with the US press. That five adult males take a loft to jointly deceive their wives sometimes could shoot down the wrong way at the puritanical Americans, Van Looy had expected. But the press reviews are so over the top that they cannot be taken seriously because they prefer to pretend as if adultery does not exist. Just go look it up in theaters or bluray and decide for yourself!
Infidelity burns, friends might not be there to share the heat. The concept of having a getaway place to fornicate is enticing, if one is seriously considering such sexual mischief The Loft serves as a guide of what should not be done. Boasting good cast and decent drama thriller, the film has pretty interesting twists and turns. However, the use of multi-perspective in varied timelines is occasionally as messy as the portrayed adulterous acts.
One woman is found dead in an apartment which turns out to be clandestine rendezvous point for five married men. The resulting roller-coaster ride takes the plot shifting constantly between past and present. It also chains together the individual story of each men, as well as their confessions with the police, resulting in many subplots. It's an ambitious undertaking, which the film is barely able to pull off.
The film method of transition is choppy. Not to mention it needs to reveal important information just at the right time, so expect backtrack aplenty. With many characters to portray, the movie sometimes veers from the mystery and rehearses overly dramatic secret lovers or scheming friends premise. Fortunately, its layered narrative pays off with good plot twists along the way, even though the journey there can be exhausting.
With good line up consisting Karl Urban, Wentworth Miller and James Marsden, the acting is decent. They do their best despite the characters beings sociopaths, pathological liars or immoral jerks at best. It's very hard to identify with them as they can be ridiculously conniving, near the level of obsession. Emotionally detached is an understatement.
The Loft does have good cinematography and crisp design, so its visual matches the big screen, although somehow it reminds me of TV crime drama series. It offers a degree of entertainment with adequate suspense and thrill.
A word to the wise: Best friends should never move in together, or share one apartment for promiscuous purpose.
Five married men enjoy sharing a beautiful apartment for their trysts, until a woman turns up handcuffed to the bed and dead. This is a classic whodunit with flashbacks to lay out the clues and every character having a motive. The plot keeps you guessing, but the suspicious glances, sometimes portentous dialogue and the director's stylistic flourishes get in the way of any tension. On the positive side, the movie's got an attractive, able cast and a high-end look. If you don't delve too deeply and appreciate this film as a crime puzzle you might enjoy trying to put the pieces together.
I don't often agree with movie critics but they nailed it on this one. Just watched it on TV - great premise, very promising. BUT, in their haste to create a whodoneit with plenty of twists and turns, the writers and directors forgot to create characters that had any depth. We don't know very much about any of them, and what we learn comes out in a mess of scattered flashbacks. The dialogue is stilted for the five guys involved and the wives are indistinguishable. I kept watching because I was curious, but it's not an engaging film. Somewhere between letting us know it's a murder mystery in the beginning and how the pieces fall together in the end, we don't get a very cohesive movie.
An erotic thriller that tries so hard to be clever and unpredictable it ends up being a convoluted mess of a film, and a waste of a highly capable cast.