2 out of 5

Directed by: Uwe Boll

Uwe Boll “retired” in 2016 or thereabouts, but essentially continued to make movies, or at least a documentary. As a fellow Boll …appreciator… you were probably already aware of this fact, but as I watched First Shift, written up as Boll’s return to filmmaking, I was allowing myself to excuse some of its structural oddities to that supposed gap; Boll was just warming up again.

To be clear, those ellipses above are because I can’t quite go as far as to call Boll a good filmmaker, but he is / has been an enthused one, often knowing where to put his production dollars to keep his films functioning with a desired effect, and developing a style that’s proven flexible enough to hop between some genres. The embrace of improvised dialogue – which I suspect happened here as well – helped and hurt, as it allowed for a very naturalistic feel to scenes, that I believe Boll capably directed to keep a conversation on target, but combined with some misdirected artistic “flair” to allow for these same scenes to go on for quite too long without payoff. Then, of course, you add on top some tried and true cheapie B-movie tricks of adding tons of B-roll* to get your runtime up to 90 minutes, a penchant for baiting an audience with shock value, and a similar assumption that We Want Blood, and it’s a recipe for films which have proven really easy to trash, but that I think have provable competence behind them if given the chance. (And even if the application of that competence is something which seems ridiculous – like the insertion of video game footage way back in House of the Dead.)

Rewinding, then: no, First Shift isn’t rough around the edges because Boll is out of practice; I think this was him approximating something more casual and less genre-y – a fly-on-the-wall drama. The odd couple cop pairing of recent Atlanta transfer Angela (Kristen Renton) with NYPD vet Deo (Gino Anthony Pesi) preps you for some cringe comedy, and there is that, but it’s otherwise bizarrely understated. Like, they take on some brutal cases, and they bond throughout this first shift together, but Boll does not go out of his way for Postal-style hijinks, instead letting that improv aspect do its thing with, I imagine, prompts for casual conversation topics, and capturing whatever humorous (or not) banter happened between Rento and Pesi. Thankfully, they are very enjoyable together, developing some natural rhythms of ribbing the other, or Pesi playing the curmudgeon versus Renton’s bright and bubbly.

The film is strange beyond this casualness, pitching us the various aforementioned cases – an elderly man reuniting with his dog; a drug-addled person harming himself; a mob killing of a family; a family annihilator – in an equally casual Pulp Fiction-y “these things are all happening at the same time but are unrelated” swing that’s scored with dramatic flair when people are just wandering around the grocery store, or only really involve our cops in the initial check of the scene, but not part of the closing of the case. In other words, it’s a Pulp Fiction of all the uneventful moments, really only giving us the eventful stuff as minimal context. The editing from Ethan Maniquis bashes all of this together in quick cuts but with no transition; Boll instead gives his 90 minute runtime mainly over to stuff like the grocery-store wandering I just mentioned, or a long ass intro of Deo drinking a protein shake. Boll is just going on vibes, man.

The movie has a crisp, cool look from Mathias Neumann that works with the “naturalistic” flow, and though I poked at the overly dramatic score – Jessica de Rooij, Hendrik Nölle – I kind of loved how it anti-worked: whether purposefully or not, First Shift suggests that there’s drama all the time, even in mundanity.

Do I think that that was purposeful? Eh… not exactly. This is not a great movie, and hardly would qualify as an entertaining episode of any given police procedural. But it’s undeniably a ramshackle Boll production, and something about the journey through his many maligned productions to here, post-“retirement”, gives it a confidence in its casualness that makes it watchable.

*I am not qualified to be a NY location scout, despite having lived there for a couple of decades, but I think even offhand NY awareness makes the B-roll shots on this flick pretty hilarious, jumping between boroughs erratically. Nice that a fair amount did seem to be legitimately shot in the city, though.