Director: Erik Van Looy
Writers: Bart De Pauw (screenplay), Wesley Strick (screenplay)
Stars: Karl Urban, James Marsden, Wentworth Miller
Storyline
The architect Vincent Stevens; the psychiatrist Chris Vanowen; the real estate agents Luke Seacord and Marty Landry; and Chris' half-brother Philip Trauner are married and best friends. Vincent proposes his friends to share a wonderful penthouse loft in a brand new building designed by him to become their rendezvous instead of using their credit cards for love affairs and one night stands in hotels. When they discover the body of a beautiful woman cuffed on the bed in the loft, they have argument to find who is the responsible and secrets are disclosed affecting their friendship.Gladiator Movie Reviews
If you ever want to know how to make a well directed and well acted mystery thriller without the good directing, acting and absence of mystery and thrill then study this film. How this director managed to take a very interesting premise and create something so dreadfully boring completely baffles me. Firstly, the structure of this film just made no sense whatsoever, it jumps back and forth from the past, present and future in an attempt to slowly reveal the mystery, but 90% of the time these flashbacks were so boring because you had no idea how they were related to the mystery until the very end. The overall directing of this film was so poorly done that there was no sense of thrill or interest in what was happening, meaning you could not at all care about the mystery that is supposed to be carrying the film. When you do finally get some sort of reveal as to what is going on, it is supposed to shock the audience, but even though i did not see it coming, it had absolutely no effect on me at all; i just thought about how dumb it was and how it made most of the film make even less sense. THEN the multiple utterly stupid twists that occur within the last 15 minutes are just desperate attempts to continue 'shocking' the audience. But rather than making the audience realise things that they didn't notice before it just completely confused everyone, because the flashbacks are supposed to provide clues that make you question things that then get answered / revealed in the end but no-one was questioning anything because they didn't know why the flashbacks were relevant.
You may hope that the performances save the film seeing as though there are actors who were great in some of their previous roles in movies and TV shows, but nope, they are all just atrocious. I want to believe that it has to do with the writing of the characters because all of your main cast sucked. Almost all of their lines seemed forced and cliché and that just took you out of the film. I did like Rachael Taylor in the film i thought she stood out over everyone else so whenever she was in frame i could stay awake, also Karl Urban had a couple of OK moments but not enough to redeem himself for the rest of the film. This film was a complete and utter disappointment in terms of the plot and performances, now i have to check out the original 2008 version and see if this movie converted crap into more crap or ruined a good original idea.
