Director: John Erick Dowdle
Screenplay: Brian Nelson, from a story by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Chris Messina, Logan Marshall-Green, Jenny O’Hara, Bojana Novakovic
Release Date: September 17th, 2010
I am an unabashed fan of Rod Serling’s seminal anthology series THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Like the best short stories, each episode told a tight, self-contained story, brief enough so as not to overstay it’s welcome, resulting in morality tales with insane twists and turns that often acted as biting social commentary, limited in scope only by the boundless imaginations of Serling and his team of writers. With DEVIL M. Night Shyamalan, who acts as producer and is credited with the story, seems to be using the basic structure laid down by Serling, that of extraordinary events happening to ordinary people, to create his own brand of fantastic tales, utilizing a pool of up and coming talent, in this case John Erick Dowdle, director of the still-unreleased THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES. The results, while initially intriguing, are middling at best.
The film begins with a very basic setup in which five nameless strangers, a young war vet (Marshall-Green), a woman in her sixties (O’Hara), a young social climber (Novakovic), a security guard (Bokeem Woodbine), and a mattress salesman (Geoffrey Arend), become trapped inside of an elevator in an upscale office building in Philadelphia, and details the de-evolution of their humanity as it becomes more and more clear that one of them harbors a murderous secret. In fact, one of them may very well be the devil himself. Brought in to resolve the situation is Detective Bowden (Messina) a man with a tragic past who is coincidentally already on the scene to investigate a mysterious suicide. Who or what is preventing rescue crews from reaching the elevator, and what is causing the mysterious blackouts that plunge the passengers into darkness, each time resulting in one of them turning up dead? One of them isn’t who they appear to be, and as their dark pasts are revealed it becomes clear that all of them, including Detective Bowden, have been assembled here for a very sinister reason.
On paper, DEVIL sounds like the perfect formula for a taut supernatural thriller. With it’s limited cast and claustrophobic location, for at least the first half it sorta works. After the third or fourth time the lights go out, however, it just gets tiresome and silly. At a scant 75 minute running time the film still feels too long, as Dowdle, while entirely competent in his the way he films the cramped interior of the elevator, pretty much exhausts all of the potential for creating tension in such close quarters within the first thirty minutes. There are only so many times I can stare at a black screen while people scream and occasionally turn up dead before I begin to grow bored.
It doesn’t help matters that the five people in the elevator are almost all immediately unlikable, and while it is later revealed that their behavior is what got them into this horrible situation to begin with, I felt that the tension was totally undercut by the fact that I actively hated each and every one of these sorry motherfuckers, and that was before I even found out how evil each of them was. None of them show any signs of basic humanity, existing merely as archetypes that have long ago grown tire i.e. the bitchy old lady, the unreasonably angry black guy, the snake oil salesman, the con artist, and the unbelievably noble and wise ex-soldier. None of them are believable as actual human beings, and so I couldn’t be bothered to care. The same can also be said of Detective Bowden, the supposed emotional anchor of the movie who, as portrayed by Chris Messina is as compelling as watching paint dry on a golf course. There is absolutely nothing to the guy other than what we are told in an introductory scene in which his brother tries to turn him towards Christianity while he laments the death of his wife and child. Messina’s facial expression, that of utter bored indifference, never falters for the duration of the film, which is a major problem because the entire emotional payoff of the film rests entirely on his shoulders, and he falls flat on his fucking face. The only interesting characters in the flick are the two security guards, Ramirez (Jacob Vargas) and Lustig (Matt Craven)who witness the entire debacle from beginning to end, and even then Ramirez is an obvious stereotype, the incredibly superstitious and easily scared Hispanic character, who exists only to make massive leaps in logic to push the film’s plot along and also has the dumbest scene in the movie in which he cites the fact that the toast he flipped into the air landed jelly-side down is proof that the devil is present. I can‘t believe I just typed that shit, but this is from the mind of Shyamalan, the same man who had a side character random deliver a soliloquy to hot dogs in the abysmal THE HAPPENING just a few years prior. I should note that every year I do this blog there is at least one recurring character actor who appears in a number of the films, and this year that appears to be Craven, who also appeared in HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME earlier this month.
While I will admit that DEVIL has it’s effective moments here and there, none of it really adds up to much in the end. There is a slight twist, and the reveal of who the devil is actually impersonating is a direct rip from the first SAW, but the overall reason for these events unfolding is underwhelming, and in many ways is a Shyamalan ripping off his own SIGNS, which also dealt with a man coming to grips with his faith after the death of a loved one. This had potential, but I would argue that potential would have been better fulfilled as an hour long short film. As it is, DEVIL is a neat premise stretched beyond it’s potential.
My Rating: 5/10
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