First Shift review – like Training Day with the good bits removed

The Guardian

13-05-2025

The most interesting thing about this crushingly mediocre cop movie is that it's directed by the notorious Uwe Boll (Postal, Alone in the Dark), who is a character more bizarre than any drafted for the screen – at one point he invited his severest critics to fight him in the boxing ring. While the poor quality of his work, especially his computer game adaptations, is perhaps overhyped – are they that bad? – there's less dispute that his films are largely not financially successful, and his output has slowed after a now-abandoned retirement. (Like Steven Soderbergh, it seems Boll just can't quit.) One of his weirder re-emergences recently was playing himself in Radu Jude's acclaimed Romanian art film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World from 2023 – after which he made this lukewarm mess.
As the title might suggest, the idea is that this follows the first shift worked by two detectives on their first day together in New York City; not unlike, say, Training Day, except without the sharp script (by David Ayer), the fluent direction (by Antoine Fuqua) or a knockout cast (Training Day's killer combo of Ethan Hawke and Denzel Washington). Instead, First Shift supplies us with C-lister Gino Anthony Pesi in the lead as Deo, a gruff loner whose isolation is underscored by an unfeasibly long opening sequence showing him getting up in the morning and doing the most mundane of activities for long minutes of empty screen time. Clearly, Boll's ineptitude for pacing has not waned.
Eventually, Deo gets to the station where he finds he's to work with a new partner, sunny Angela (Kristen Renton, serviceable) who's only just moved to the Big Apple from Florida. Of course, the two very different personalities clash, with Deo sneering at Angela's chirpy disposition while she bridles mildly at his sexist digs.
Boll's self-penned script and the machete-like editing throw some almost avant garde shapes as it contrives to abruptly intercut between the lead cops' banter in their car and some gangsters bopping around town sadistically killing people – though these plotlines barely intersect at all in the course of the film. Presumably things are being set up for a future shift in which the duo – bonded at the end by mutual appreciation of a cute dog and a murder-suicide crime scene, storylines given roughly equal emotional weight here – bring the gangsters to heel. The clumsiness of the storytelling, presumably unintentional, is almost entertaining in itself but only if basically inept film-making is your idea of fun.
First Shift is on digital platforms from 19 May.