After a successful heist, five thieves decide to hold up for the night in an abandoned warehouse while they wait for their buyer to show up. Throwing their hostage Jennifer (Meisha Johnson) into a back room, the band of purloiner’s plan to sit around and chew the fat about anything that strikes their fancy: Robin Williams, masturbation and basically everything a horny 17 year old would talk about at great lengths. Up until this point, I thought that Dav Kaufman’s directorial debut, 13 HOURS IN A WAREHOUSE, was just a bizarro version of RESERVOIR DOGS and an unengaging one at that. Unfortunately, it isn’t just one film thats being ripped off in this production; its a whole slew of them

While bound and gagged, Jennifer is visited by a sympathetic spectre, appearing to to her as a garbled television signal (*cough* THE RING *cough*), who releases her. Meanwhile, Randy (Chars Bonin) and Mike (Daniel Salmen), the two brothers in the gang of robbers, realize that the warehouse they’re currently hiding out in and the one where their father used to shoot pornos is one and the same (how convenient!). And by pornos, I mean snuff films. We’re then treated to a second half that is basically 8MM with a few ghosts thrown in the mix.

13 HOURS mainly suffers from a really bad script. I’d say at least twenty to thirty minutes could have been cut out of the film, accounting for almost all of the aimless and boring conversations about nothing that take place throughout. It’s astounding how anyone with a word processor and a camera thinks they can do Tarantino. I got news for you guys: even QT’s conversations are a bit tedious at times. But at least he, more often than not, strikes a good balance between nonsense and meaningful plot driven dialogue. Having a conversation about nothing is indeed a very common and natural occurrence but when I watch a movie, I want to be entertained, not hear people talk below their intelligence level. There’s nothing realistic about a group of thieves, all of which look like they’re in their mid-twenties to early thirties, talking about giving themselves “the stranger”. I’m not as old as the characters in the film are suppose to be and even I quit joking around about that sort of stuff a few years ago so I can’t imagine a group of supposedly hardened, gritty criminals, who don’t appear to value human life in the slightest, giving pet names to their right hands. It doesn’t help matters that all of the acting comes off as amateurish, straddling the line between minimalistic and over-the-top at random.

Aside from an unintentionally hilarious scene with dead rats being set up on what looked like a dining room play set, there’s nothing particularly entertaining or original about 13 HOURS IN A WAREHOUSE. Sure, it lives up to its title, seeing as it provides a warehouse, but that doesn’t mean it had to feel like it was thirteen hours long.