I approached Uwe Boll's First Shift with trepidation (and curiosity). I had heard the director's name before, though I wasn't familiar with his movies. Certain YouTubers make fun of him, calling his movies some of the worst ever made, and lumping him in with narcissistic nuts like Neal Breen (messianic complex) and Steven Segal (lazy messianic complex). Is he really that bad, I wondered? I was prepared to turn it off after a few minutes and not write about it. I swore when I started reviewing that if I couldn't say something good about a movie, I wouldn't say anything at all.
I stayed with it. The word that keeps showing up in my notes is "endless." Yet I stayed with it. And I can report…I kinda liked it.
"Endless" because scenes just go on too long. The credit sequence is interminable; we follow our protagonist waking up in his apartment, shaving, brushing his teeth, cleaning his toothbrush, making a power smoothie, washing out the juicer, and I'm thinking: Come on! Get on with it!
Then the overlong montage of New York City streets, which follow no pattern—here we are on Times Square, now in the Bronx, now in the Financial District, now Staten Island—set to incongruously swelling music. Mr. Boll loves New York. We get it.
The basic idea is a cliché. Deo is a scowling city detective, a maverick, who is partnered with a woman his opposite. Angela smiles a lot, posts selfies, and comes off to Deo as a ditz. The alpha male begrudgingly takes on the Instagram queen and they attend to crimes while bickering comically.
But Deo and Angela settle their differences pretty quickly. First Shift becomes a pokey thriller with comic undertones: not too many thrills and goofy but endearing comedy. It comes on like an old dog looking for attention, and even has a dog in a pivotal role. So it can't be all bad.
The action is pretty tame, and not all that coherent. Deo and Angela outwit a guy threatening passersby with a meat cleaver. A mob boss has to be foiled. A PTSD guy locks himself in the bathroom after committing a heinous crime. An old guy leaves his dog outside a supermarket (again, going through the aisles with him and his cart: interminable) in which he promptly has a heart attack. The ambulance loads him, leaving the dog. Deo fetches him. All in a day’s work for a NYC cop.
But the actors, Gino Anthony Pesi as Deo and Kristen Renton as Angela, fit together nicely as a team. He's got a Soprano-ish appeal (he had a role in TV's Shades of Blue), and she's pretty and flighty until it's hammer time (she was in FX's Sons of Anarchy). The banter isn't as cringe-y as it might be. They cruise around the city and for the most part I enjoyed watching them. I wondered where exactly director Mr. Boll was going with this. Check the time, the movie's almost over and not much has happened, when suddenly a title card comes up: "Coming soon: Part Two." Okay, Part One was relatively painless. I'd watch more.
Uwe Boll reminds me of a New York filmmaker I admire: Larry Cohen. Mr. Cohen was a journeyman director who made Manhattan-centric movies on miniscule budgets. Phone Book and It's Alive are his. He worked with character actors like Tony Lo Bianco, David Carradine, and Michael Moriarty. His movies were offbeat and loosey-goosey. Check out Q: the Winged Serpent and God Told Me To. Most of all, Larry Cohen really loved making movies. He died in 2019.
So does Uwe Boll. First Shift has that same carefree quality. His filmography is Cohen-like. Mr. Boll is a journeyman filmmaker, too, training his camera on whatever he's being paid to, yet somehow making it part of his oeuvre. He writes a lot, directs a lot, produces a lot. He has nearly forty movies to his personal credit, with titles like Rampage: Capital Punishment, Assault on Wall Street, Bloodrayne, and Blubberella. He rarely gets above a 5.0 rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet I've seen worse, and more opportunistic.
Maybe he just caught me on a good day. Would I recommend First Shift? Sure, as long as you're willing to suspend disbelief and a standard of quality. Just relax and lean into it. It’s like spending time with a new friend.
And he likes dogs.
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First Shift. Directed by Uwe Boll. 2024. From Event Films. In select theaters and VOD. 88 minutes.