听 User Rating 
Contains strong language, and moderate nudity and sex references
Titular travel inn the Niagara Motel provides the setting for this disappointing black comedy. The lives of an ensemble cast of disparate, desperate characters (including Brits Craig Ferguson and Anna Friel) intersect at the rundown lodge, and if that set-up sounds uninspired, it's symptomatic of a lack of originality that thunders through director Gary Yates' guileless second feature like the famous Falls.
The Canadian tourist mecca provides a gaudy backdrop for a glut of glum disillusion - a trick that's been pulled with Las Vegas countless times. Ferguson plays Phillie, the shambolic motel handyman drinking his way to oblivion and trying to forget his wife's death. He flits in and out of scenes, adding a semblance of continuity to the stories of the motel's other guests. These include Denise (Friel), a junkie mother in town with her ex-con husband (Kris Holden-Reid) to win her child back from social services; and Henry and Lily (Peter Keleghan and Wendy Crewson), a downwardly mobile middle-class couple, who've pitched up in Niagara looking for work. Also featured is Loretta (Caroline Dhavernas), a dunderheaded waitress caught between three versions of the wrong man: an obsessive ex-boyfriend, a drippy desk-jockey looking for a trophy wife, and a predatory porno pimp (played by Kevin Pollak).
"TOTAL LACK OF DRAMATIC TENSION"
Yates has given himself so many stories to tell here that his only plausible excuse for Niagara Motel's total lack of dramatic tension or laughs is a script that fails to include a solitary good line. It's a shame for the few decent performers in the cast - notably Holden-Reid and Crewson - who all plummet over the edge together.
