Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
CAMPY WARNER, January 6, 2004
Remember, folks, this movie was made before the awful disaster on 9/11. Wisely, the movie got held until later. So, if you consider that, the terrorist implication and the jokes about Bin Laden perhaps formed a sort of foreshadowing or warning. At any rate, I found "The Shaft" rather enjoyable. It has several really disturbing scenes: the death of the skateboarder was incredibly paced and filmed; the floor dropping out was mindboggling; and even the decapitated security guard's death was nerve-wracking. Add some really "humorous" asides: the foul mouthed day care teacher was way out of left field. The performances were adequate. Take Naomi Watts off of her post-Shaft pedestal (Mulholland Drive/The Ring) and you get a young actress doing the best with what she had. James Marshall who also worked with Lynch on Twin Peaks is effective, not great. Eric Thal did a nice job as his friend Jeffrey; Michael Ironside, Ron Pearlman and Dan Hedaya were effective in their almost cameo roles. Even Edward Hermann looking more and more like a younger Rudy Vallee captured the right amount of commercialism in his role. Maybe they did use the f word a little too much, but have you noticed that if the f word gets used a lot in a critically acclaimed movie (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, etc.) no one gripes about that.
Take THE SHAFT for what it is--an above average thriller that delivers.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hmmmm..., June 4, 2003
This movie does for elevators what The Legend of Boggy Creek 2 did for Mad Dog attacks. It's all about elevators with human brains that force women into premature labor, teach skaters not to smoke pot, pose as terrorists and kill men, women, children, the blind and their seeing eye dogs. James Marshall stars as an ex-marine elevator repairman that plays air guitar. He's really come a long way since his Twin Peaks days-this is the male equivalent of being spit out of the bottom of the porn industry. Naomi Watts' portrayal of the smut journalist rivals that of James Earl Jones in The Ambulance. I must warn you that she is much, much less naked than she is in Mulholand Dr. It boggles the mind that she made Lynch's Oscar nominated tribute to ambiguity, The Ring and The Shaft all in the same year. The rest of the cast is a duck gallery of B-movie actors: Ron Perlman (the brilliantly played retarded/perverted monk Salvatore in The Name of the Rose as well as Konstantine Konali in Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow), Dan Hedaya (Karla's ex-husband on Cheers, Richard Nixon in Dick and Alicia Silverstone's father in Clueless), Edward Herrmann (the head, middle-age single mother chasing vampire in The Lost Boys), Michael Ironside (from Starship Troopers, and Seaquest fame) and many more that I'm tired of looking up. Martin McDougall and John Cariani star as a pair of porn-obsessed night watchman that are salute to the bumbling law enforcers in Plan 9 from Outer Space. Well...maybe they are. The movie works on many levels, e.g., most of the people who rent or buy this movie end up feeling like they got The Shaft. I really can't figure out if it's good or bad. It's either very, very clever or one of the worst I've ever seen. Nonetheless, I'm buying the DVD.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
I Always Knew Elevators Were Evil!, May 22, 2003
The first thing you will notice about 'The Shaft' is that the acting is not good at all. Not even Naomi Watts (whom I enjoyed in 'The Ring') could deliver a line like she really meant it. You don't realize how annoying bad acting is until you see an entire movie full of it.The second thing you will notice about 'The Shaft' is that every other word spoken by anyone is the F word. At first, it was cute. After the 600th time I heard it, I decided to give up swearing for good. The only other thing more annoying than bad acting? Over-use of the F word. The third thing you will notice about 'The Shaft' is that the elevators are evil! I've heard of people being evil. I've even heard of buildings being evil. But...an elevator? Actually, it may be more than just one elevator, but something freaky is happening in the Millennium Building in New York, and people are dying. Naomi plays a reporter who thinks there's a lot more to these deaths than just a malfunction. So, she teams up with an elevator repairman to get to the the bottom of it. Is it terrorists? Is the building built over an Indial burial ground? (yes, believe it or not, that was mentioned as a possibility.) Or is the elevator just a quick way to travel to hell? A couple of the scenes in the elevators reminded me of the elevator scene in 'Speed', and I wished I was watching that instead. I will admit that a couple of the evil elevator scenes were kinda cool, but the ending was just downright silly (and not well-explained). The fourth thing you will notice about 'The Shaft' is that it could have had potential - not to be a box office horror hit, but to at least be a decent straight-to-video release. Of course, they would have had to recast the entire cast, rewrite the script and explain themselves a little better in the end. If the movie had been done correctly, it should have made me scared to death to ever set foot in an elevator again (I've never liked elevators at all), but I'll still take my chances if it's 4 or more floors I have to travel up. Do not waste your time on this. If you want to see Naomi in a better-acted, better-scripted movie, get 'The Ring'. If you want to watch a movie about an evil building, try 'The Shining'. But if you want my advice, I'd suggest taking the stairs.
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