First Shift

Uwe Bolle the writer, director and producer of this filmed watched too many bad New York City cop films, before he wrote this one. This film is full of cliches and cliched characters. I'm always leery of films where the writer, producer and director are the same person, I'm more leery when they're also the star.

The first incident that they attend, a guy with a clever has been cutting himself but he stops bleeding and the only blood is on the clever. Where is the continuity, the guy should have blood dripping from him.

The dialog is inane. Angela has diarrhea of the mouth, I'd want to get away from her too. The acting is low budget. I gave up, there are much better films I'd rather watch.

The trailer looked promising though when I saw Boll as the director I had some mighty reservations but all for naught. This was a very entertaining cop movie and certainly not deserving the low score it has here. And while there a few weirdly shot scenes the movie despite as others have said being somewhat disjointed is actually well directed. The strength of the entertainment is admittedly because of the two engaging lead actors ( I've seen him in guest parts on shows and a couple of movies; her never ) and their endless entertaining banter had my wife and I laughing quite a bit. If you're a dog lover there's a small subplot that you'll definitely enjoy. The only thing missing was a good cop shootout but like most cops work lives, that doesn't happen very often. If this were a show we'd definitely be watching but suffice that they have a possible part 2 in the works or already made. Be sure to hear the fantastic music at the beginning of the end credits.

This movie takes 25 minutes to get to the first police action scene, a guy cutting the same part of his arm over and over again with a cleaver. I guess that was the only bleeder special effects they had? After 3-4 times chopping the same place I expected the hand to fall off.

Lots of cop-new-partner buddy talk. Really incredibly boring stuff. Lots of tracking shots of Gino Pesi walking around in his dark coat. Like John Wick, but without any shooting or fighting.

His co-star Detective Kristin Renton acted like she just came from MTV, and she had. She seemed about to start dancing at any point. Just totally no dynamics with the sour personality of Gino Pesi.

Into the movie are cut various scenes of unexplained guy and his girlfriend and son. At some point she wants to leave him because he is doing drugs. No explanation what the connection is to the main characters. Eventually at the end, we get a pretty disgusting murder scene, and the connection is just bombed into the movie.

Halfway in, an old guy (Willie C. Carpenter) has a seizure at a grocery store, and Pesi sees him at the hospital, and the old man asks him to find his dog. Pesi goes back to the grocery store and finds the dog.

The scenes with the dog, Pesi, and Renton are by far the best scenes in this movie. The dog is really friendly and reacts to Pesi better than his partner Renton does. They made the movie a lot better by putting the dog into it. The dog was the only actor that had chemistry with Pesi.

Reading the info on this I went into it thinking it would be a good view, I don't put too much thought into a movie except that it's a break from reality for an hour and a half of entertainment but quite honestly this one was kinda boring, the acting was definitely B movie rating, storyline was all over the place and the characters don't really pull you in too well, main character seems guarded but at the same time opens up messing it up for us as viewers, no spoilers here but I wouldn't recommend this one to anyone as like I said, it is on the boring side and one of those movies where you will watch it one time and never again.

This was a really generic cop drama that is almost a ridiculous stereotype of the genre. Eastwood did the exact same movie over and over in the Dirty Harry franchise. But worse, its obviously a pilot for a tv series that no one bought.

Uwe Boll has always been a hack, but this seems more like a director for hire tv movie right out of the 70s.

All that said, I liked the cast. I hope this earns them some more roles. It wasnt their fault the story wandered all over the place, and really had no plot or direction. The ending leaves you looking for the next episode. Its not a bad watch, and I dont feel like I wasted 90 minutes, but it just isnt original at all.