I'm finding this very difficult to write. After a few false starts I realise how hard it is to properly convey the unusual badness of "City Loop". It's not that it's VERY bad - "insufferably bad" is the strongest phrase I'd use - but it is, unlike many bad things, INDISPUTABLY bad. Moreover (and this is a different thing again) I don't see how anyone could take pleasure in watching it.
It's a multi-story ensemble pic in which the stories aren't really stories (they're CALLED stories - "Dom's Story", "Misha's Story", etc., but nothing to speak of happens in them), and the ensemble consists entirely of characters I found it impossible, and I mean IMPOSSIBLE, to take any interest in. (What I wanted to happen was ALWAYS whatever would bring the film to a merciful end.) All characters are amoral and inarticulate, they all move through the world at random, none of them have redeeming qualities (few of them even have qualities). Chayko tries to swindle us into caring by leaving crucial matters unexplained (an excuse to make us watch some scenes TWICE, as if once weren't bad enough), but it doesn't work.
I haven't exhausted the film's weaknesses. Photography is unattractive - although I get the feeling it probably wasn't the cinematographer's fault; it feels rather as if Chayko took the poor man (or woman - I fled as soon as the credits began, so I wouldn't know) to some ugly, bare location, asked him to film the ugliest part of it, and then tied his (/her) hands by firing the lighting technician. The music is also pretty drab. The best thing going for it is the fact that, although it seems as though it will never end, it really doesn't last very long.
