Mord im Loft

It confuses me why some great movies like this have subpar ratings and others are completely overrated. Of all the boring Saturday movies I've watched on Netflix, this one remains my favorite. It's best to go into this movie knowing as little as possible. If you love thrillers and "who did it" type movies, this will be a satisfying movie to you. I've read some complaints about the ending, but I disagree. The ending was fairly realistic, and that made it satisfying to me. It's not an Oscar worthy movie, but it's a good guilty pleasure movie, especially for a Netflix day.

I was surprised how good this film was. I usually figure out who done its before the reveal but I didn't with this one. It can be a bit confusing jumping around from past and present but that adds to the mystery. Its a smart movie and we don't get those that often. Performances are good- most actors seemed to be a bit out of their typical roles. Wentworth Miller was very different from Prison Break and its nice to see Karl Urban break away from SciFi/Fantasy franchises. Eric Stonestreet was very different from his TV role and James Mardsen showed the conflict of someone going against their norm. Also, it was nice to have a movie this length- not so long its hard to stand up when the film is done. Its a shame the studio didn't really back it and do any advertising. I never saw a TV spot- just a preview. They also kept pushing back the release date. Its a shame this one will just probably fade into DVD obscurity because its good and entertaining.

From the opening moments of 'The Loft' you can guess pretty much exactly what you're in for. A "whodunnit" mystery with plentiful twists, where not everything is as it seems. Knowing that much doesn't hurt a film at all. In fact it makes the next couple of hours something to be very much looked forward to - or at least for me it does. You could say the format of the genre is lacking in originality, but you could rarely say two films are the same and anyone who says they saw the ending coming is almost always lying or exaggerating a fleeting suspicious they had. This is why I love mystery-thrillers.

'The Loft' is a fun watch - nothing more, nothing less. It achieves exactly what it sets out to. The 5 lead actors were all pretty solid and gave credible performances. I think I will always see Eric Stonestreet as his brilliant character from 'Modern Family', so I struggled a bit at first to take him seriously in his role here, but he's good enough of an actor to get past that. The dialogue was tightly written and every detail that could otherwise have been questioned was covered well. The only fault I could find was the score sometimes drowning out the dialogue which can be annoying in a film like this where you are trying to catch every spoken detail. Altogether though a fine movie.

.. a movie that's far more entertaining than most of the crap produced these days.

Really nice acting, cringe-worthy characters (in a good way) played by talented & believable actors with a nice suspenseful/thrilling plot. I honestly thought I would hate it when I started watching it on BluRay, but wow, I sat through it all without even taking a bathroom break.

Not going to spoil anything, except for the fact that this movie is another reason why the so called "critics" should not be listened to.

Oh and watch it with your wife for the best experience.

"The Loft" is a remake of a Belgian film, and focuses on five married men who go in on a ritzy high rise loft for the purposes of pursuing their affairs and sexual escapades. When a girl winds up dead in a pool of blood in the loft, the five men panic as they attempt to unravel who she is and where she came from.

Taking some cues from Hitchcock (and not exactly with a fraction of Hitch's poise), "The Loft" is an overall entertaining film, but the script at times is the equivalent of a cheap Rubik's cube— it looks fine, it's a fun puzzle, I guess, but it's really just not that impressive overall.

The film shifts between past and present, unraveling the narrative through flashbacks which are sandwiched between the current dilemma of the four men arguing in the loft over the corpse of the dead blonde. The pacing is a bit choppy, and the transitions rather abrupt. James Marsden and Wentworth Miller are among the film's greatest star power here, but the cast overall is really underwhelming, and the performances are at times borderline campy as the men play up their roles as buffoonish plutocratic mattress hounds.

The finale cements my feelings of the film as an underwhelming thriller that seems more suited for television than the silver screen, but I still can't say it was totally not worth the time. In spite of the hammy performances, the disjointed narrative, and the overall sensibility of utter lifelessness that the film has, it is still by and large an entertaining flick. Nearly impossible to take seriously, but for entertainment's sake, it's passable. 5/10.