First Shift

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.

One of those movies that probably won't have anything that really sticks with you long term but there isn't really anything egregiously bad here. Some fun scenes, and a couple interesting scenes of action. Some dialogue is quite awkward and some parts of the movie feel like the characters had no reason to do what they ended up doing but I wasn't expecting anything groundbreaking from this. Uwe Boll has made many a bad movie in his time but this is definitely on the better end of his catalogue. I think that the overly negative reviews may be in part to his notorious reputation since over the years he has attracted a vast array of trolls.

Didn't expect to like it, but the movie has heart. It kept moving.

I understand the previous review's claim it was too slow, but it is a style.

Reminds me of the crime genre from yesteryear, sans the detective bent.

Would be great spun off into annual 3 or 6 episode BBC type miniseries.

Actors had good chemistry and situational dialogue was believable.

No spoilers, but I have a good iidea where the sequel is headed.

Enjoyable characters, felt like a pilot and went by fast.

With clever writing, the premise could go in many directions.

Wish I could tune back in next week.

Cross between Starsky and Hutch and Law And Order.

It's a trifecta... poorly written, poorly acted and poorly directed. A possible career ender for all involved. From its nonsensical plot to the painfully wooden performances, this movie is a masterclass in cinematic mediocrity, leaving viewers with a profound sense of wasted time and a yearning for something, anything, to engage with on screen.

The narrative, if you can call it that, is a jumbled mess of poorly connected subplots that seem to have been thrown together haphazardly. Characters are introduced with no apparent purpose, their motivations unclear, and their arcs abruptly truncated without any satisfying resolution. The story attempts to tackle themes of love, loss, and redemption, but falls flat at every turn, leaving the audience bewildered and questioning if they missed some crucial piece of the puzzle that never actually existed.

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.