Brief review: "The Entrance"

Distributor: Lionsgate



The Entrance is a 76-minute exercise in boredom via a storyline that goes in circles without really explaining or resolving anything in even close to a satisfactory manner.

A man wakes up in a parking garage, no clue how he got there. While looking for a way out, he comes across a janitor named Joe. He then starts to remember. He was in a room with other men in the same situation. There was a voice telling them that each is a sinner and will soon be sacrificed, to what is unknown. Somehow, the man manages to escape. He goes to the police, who don't buy his story, especially after learning that he is a convicted drug dealer.

As the detective is leaving work, he jumps her and holds a gun to her head while forcing her to drive to the parking garage. Once there, he tells her that he is leaving, that he had been given a second chance if he brought someone in his place. Now the detective must find a way out before she becomes the next sacrifice...

Sounds decent from the synopsis, right? I thought so too. Unfortunately, the admittedly interesting material is mishandled. The already short film regurgitates the same scenes over and over again, showing flashbacks multiple times even when they were just shown no more than 10 minutes prior. To make matters worse, when the detective is trapped, she starts to experience the same exact flashbacks as the man for no explainable reason. This reeks of laziness on the part of the writer-director Damon Vignale. He clearly did not have enough material so he cheated by reusing the same footage; it's like the movie "Vantage Point" but without the gimmick of different viewpoints on the action. Here, we get the same exact viewpoint way more than is necessary.

To make matters worse, the film has the gall to end without really explaining anything, even in a fundamental way via clues through which the viewer can try and figure out things for themselves. This is another cop-out that frustrates beyond belief.

Frustrate beyond belief pretty much sums up The Entrance as a whole. You'd be better off doing pretty much anything else other than watching this empty void of a motion picture.