A bunch of junk movies you might have skipped in theaters…
The Loft…A movie about five male friends who share a literal bachelor pad so they can cheat on their wives in secret. That is, until one of the women dies and they have to figure out which one killed here. It’s a cast full of blandly appealing, generic almost stars (like James Marsden and Karl Urban) but it becomes clear about halfway through that the creative team spent less time on the central mystery than they did on making the movie look as slick as a Cadillac ad, and that’s kind-of a problem for a Whodunit. Still, there is some gorgeous photography like a climactic face-off in the rain that looks like a perfume commercial, and those that like glamorous set design may enjoy it. Grade: C-
Hot Pursuit…An easy contender for any “Worst of the Year” list. Audiences avoided this Sofia Vergara/Reese Witherspoon action “comedy” in droves, and I can’t blame them. The plot seems like something borrowed from the 90’s, Witherspoon and Vergara have no chemistry, and the jokes land with a thud, especially some of Vergara’s punchlines that you might need subtitles to understand. Grade: D-
The Cobbler…This is perhaps the most disappointing on the list since it actually had potential, primarily in the form of a great plot (a cobbler can literally take a “walk in someone else’s shoes” when he tries them on and becomes that person) and an ace director (Tom McCarthy, responsible for the far superior “Spotlight”). Still, it is an Adam Sandler movie, and he seems downright asleep in most of his scenes here. It doesn’t help that the staging is aimless, and the movie never really capitalizes on its premise since Sandler may look like different people, but this has no affect on how his character behaves as them. Grade: C
The Longest Ride…If you told me that a Nicolas Sparks-based movie would be considered the “best” of anything, I might confiscate your driver’s license, but this movie actually is the best of a bad lot. Sure, it’s a sappy love story about a Manhattan-bound Southern girl and a rodeo lummox “from different worlds” (that sure look a lot like the same place) and an old-timer (Alan Alda) narrating his own past love story. “Longest Ride” is a bit more sophisticated than other Sparks-based-films–particularly the scenes with young Alda and his wife–and the rodeo bits explain more about the rules for rodeo, and why an idiot would go through all that. Grade: B-