First Shift (2024) Review: A Misguided Cop Drama Lacking Dramatic Stakes

Remember Uwe Boll? Well, the schlockmeister behind some of the worst video-game movies of all time (House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark and the BloodRayne trilogy) is back with his first American movie in eight years since Rampage: President Down in 2016. Boll’s latest movie, First Shift isn’t based on any video game but rather a cop drama that looks like he’s making his own version of Training Day.

The story follows Deo (Gino Anthony Pesi, best known for TV’s Shades of Blue), a New York cop from the 74th Precinct finds himself reluctantly working with his new partner, Angela (Kristen Renton) from Atlanta assigned by his superior officer, Lt. Walden (Tia Dionne Hodge). While Angela is excited about her first shift with Deo, the latter finds her chatty nature annoying. Deo is more of a lone wolf who prefers to work alone and in the beginning, they don’t see things eye to eye.

As the title suggests, the movie takes place over twelve hours as the two cops on duty from dealing with a suicidal madman on the street threatening to kill himself with a meat cleaver to a double-homicide case. The latter involves the murders of a father (Aaron Berg) and a son in the apartment.

The story also focuses on Deo looking after the recently hospitalised man’s (Willie C. Carpenter) dog, Tango until his full recovery. Then, there’s the seemingly disconnected subplot revolving around an emotionally distraught man (James McMenamin) locked himself inside the bathroom. His girlfriend (Brandi Bravo) keeps knocking and begging him to open the door.

Amidst Deo and Angela’s police work, we see them sharing, arguing and debating about everything from Angela’s gluten allergy and her love for kombucha to Deo’s cold remarks about the post-Covid era and how community, media and politics have changed.

Boll had his fair share of bad movies but he did make some surprisingly decent ones in the past, namely 2009’s bleak action drama Rampage (no, not that Midway Games’ video game title of the same name). His Training Day-like new movie is actually more of a slice-of-life, episodic drama on the routines of police officers and his aim for realism does score some minor points, notably the on-location shoot around the boroughs of New York City.

Gino Anthony Pesi looks the part playing a no-nonsense, cynical cop but Kristen Renton’s Angela is awkwardly portrayed as a selfie-loving and ecstatic police partner who loves to live streaming her routines on social media, making me feel as if Boll is desperately attempting to stay relevant with the current trend of the influencer culture. It doesn’t help either when he tries to inject some buddy-comedy elements, complete with the obligatory mismatched-partners angle into his cop drama. It feels like it was shoehorned for the sake of lightening up the tone instead of something that fits organically.

Among other problems lies in how the movie looks like a failed pilot episode of a cop series. The stakes are disappointingly low for a New York-set cop drama. It certainly lacks the gritty realism that the movie desperately needed here. There is barely any sense of peril throughout the two cops’ first shift as they navigate around the city. Even with the mob involvement integrated later in the movie, it just glossed over which doesn’t contribute much to enliven the story. One of the subplots, which follows Deo spending his time between shifts taking care of a dog, is meant to humanise his otherwise steely demeanour. And yet, it drags the already mundane story further that the movie’s nearly 90-minute length is equivalent to enduring an excruciatingly long day waiting for the shift to be over.

Then, there’s the ending that frustrates me the most. It’s like after spending time watching the story trying to build up the two cops’ journey handling various situations, only to fizzle out with an unexpectedly inconclusive ending and a zero payoff.