A group of mostly handsome guys with terrible personalities have mostly pretty wives who are sometimes nice and sometimes not nice. These horrible five men buy a loft together so that they can take their various mistresses somewhere that is untraceable - after all, no one in Hollywood understands how tracking people works. Of course, there's no thought to the fact that one person being caught means they all get caught.
As a result of their horrible personalities, I couldn't care less what happens to them. This is an inherent problem with this movie - you are given five people as protagonists who all have blindingly significant personality flaws to the point that they are unrelatable. Which one is responsible for the dead woman that they found in the loft? Who cares? I hope all of their lives degenerate into a swirling chasm of fiery manure.
The idea behind this kind of whodunit is nothing new, but you have to start with characters that the audience can empathize with, and if I am any good sampling of what the audience thinks, the writers missed the mark. I was distracted by the fact that we have Cyclops, Judge Dredd, Captain Cold, and (more obscurely) DJ Cosmonaut X from Elektra. So, we have guys from superhero movies, which I tend to like. Their characters here, unsurprisingly, are completely different.
Unfortunately, the acting is, on the whole, about as good as you might expect from a Lifetime movie. In fact, I would be very easily convinced that this was a Lifetime movie. After all, you have a female victim, unlikable men, and wronged wives. Add to that the ill-conceived story, and this may as well be on TV. Here's the thing: this is a remake of a Belgian movie called Loft, and I wonder if that movie was just as bad. I can see that it got better reviews on IMDB, but that has proven to be an unreliable source of finding good movies.
As a crime movie, incidentally, it is right crap. For some reason, the writers ignore forensic sciences unless they think they can just glaze over them, so they will make a passing remark like, "the place was wiped." They also do the worst thing that a movie of this kind can do - they will not give you all the information so that you can come to a conclusion using evidence. Not that I'm one for nostalgia, but why can't people write as well as Agatha Christie?
Direction was okay
Story was crap
Acting was lousy
Dialog was campy
Bottom Line: Don't waste your time.
1.0/5