‘The Loft’ Review
Stars: Karl Urban, James Marsden, Wentworth Miller, Rhona Mitra, Eric Stonestreet, Matthias Schoenaerts, Isabel Lucas, Rachael Taylor, Valerie Cruz, Kali Rocha, Elaine Cassidy, Margarita Levieva, Kristin Lehman, Robert Wisdom, Ric Reitz | Written by Bart De Pauw, Wesley Strick | Directed by Erik Van Looy
I often question why movies are remade, especially those where it seems the remake has come just to remove subtitles and translate it to an English-speaking audience. This seemed to be the case with The Loft which is a new version of the director Erik Van Looy’s own movie Loft…
When five married men conspire to buy a penthouse loft which they can share as a place to have their affairs and live out their fantasies. The last thing they thought would happen though is that it would lead to a death, a murder of a women from their past. When they try to work out what has happened, this leads to old wounds reopening and revelations about the men that they’d rather not share.
The Loft is a film that while entertaining is just a little too light to truly find its own potential. There is a definite style that could fit a Film Noir with the use of flashbacks, several women who could fill the femme fatale role and the mystery waiting to be revealed but it doesn’t seem to want to take that route, staying within the lines of just another typical murder mystery. We see a number of twists used to keep the plot going until we get to the inevitable conclusion, with of course a few more twists just to be surprising. This does work up to a point, but take too much notice of the actual script and weaknesses start to appear. In truth it’s best to ignore it and just let the truth be revealed.
Looking at the star power in The Loft, the cast is quite surprising. Recognisable actors such as Karl Urban, James Marsden, Wentworth Miller and Rhona Mitra – they do a good job of keeping our attention and do this well. Urban takes the most important role, but really all the owners of The Loft play the part of the lead role as part of the mystery is just who the wronged man is, and where does the blame for the death lie? They are all duplicitous characters who are hard to like, though Karl Urban does have a certain charm to him, even if he is just as guilty as the rest (or is he?)
Although I liked The Loft and it is entertaining I do think that I may hunt down the original and see if it is an improvement on this remake. It is not fair to write off this movie as a total failure because it is far from that. If anything it goes for a tone that is too light for the dark events that we see on the screen.
While I was slightly disappointed with The Loft it is still well worth a watch, there is a mystery that at first isn’t too predictable and the twists do keep the plot flowing well. As I’ve admitted I did look for something in the film that disappointingly wasn’t there but even with that I still enjoyed the film. I just think that for me personally it felt like the true potential of the story was not fulfilled by what we saw on the screen.
***½ 3.5/5
The Loft is available in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray now.
