Devil

If you recall back in my "Inception" review, before the movie started a certain trailer for a movie called "Devil" played.  And it was greeted with a collective groan - boos even - from the audience.  This is all thanks to the words "A Film by M. Night Shyamalan" which accompanied the trailer, words which in a post "The Happening" and "Airbender" world can only be marketing poison for any perspective film.  However, I didn't think the trailer looked half bad:  it had a decent promise for a mystery horror movie and seemed like a perfect "Twilight Zone" episode, which is never a bad thing*.  Perhaps I was also motivated by the furious reaction it got in the crowd.  "You all think this is garbage just because M. Night is involved, but I'm going to show you that 'Devil' is the little movie that can!"

Here's the thing:  Shyamalan didn't actually direct or write this movie, despite his name being everywhere in this project.  He's just a Producer, and is credited with "the idea", whatever that means.  The actual screenwriter is Brian Nelson and the actual director is John Erick Dowdle, which thanks to a bit of research are not names that inspire much confidence in me either come to think of it.  Dowdle made the stink-fest "Quarentine" and Nelson wrote the equally smelly "30 Days of Night".  This movie is also part of the "Night Chronicles", whatever that is, presumably some kind of compilation of horror films which bare Shyamalan's adopted middle name.  Considering how far M. Night has fallen recently, I'd put the odds of any more Night Chronicles to be roughly zero.  In fact, I'm surprised this movie got a wide-release at all.  This may indeed be Shyamalan's last hurrah - that one final film to slip by before he's finally run out Hollywood forever.

So here I am, reviewing the other movie created by the director of the worst movie of the year.  Was "Devil" everything I expected?  Or has M. Night's legendary failure streak once again taken another cinematic victim?

I'm happy to report, I actually was 100% right about this one.  I went in expecting a reasonably entertaining movie with a few scares and a nice unanticipated final twist, and I left seeing a reasonably entertaining movie with a few scares and a nice unpredictable final twist.  This is Shyamalan's best movie in ten years, since "Unbreakable".  Finally after years of hauteur attempts to make the most suspenseful movies EVER with the greatest final twists EVER, M. Night has returned to the basics:  have a good mystery premise and let it play out naturally.  "Devil" isn't a groundbreaking landmark movie, its just a suspense film with a some quick effective scares.  But that's all you need!  Shyamalan was trying to reinvent the genre with every single movie, and wound up with nothing but failure after failure and then an ultimate failure that forced him to do a big budget blockbuster movie, "The Last Airbender", a disastrous piece of work that I've heard trumps all the rest (a review of that is on its way).  This movie has no such ambitions.  Its just here to entertain, and entertain it did.

The premise of "Devil" is this:  five total strangers walk into an elevator in a skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia, and then it breaks down; they're trapped.  The maintenance workers would have it all fixed in a few moments, however there is one little snag - one of the passengers is actually the Devil in human form.  But who is it?  Is it the guy from "Super Troopers" who plays a douchebaggy carper salesman?  The sexy young woman?  The terrified elderly woman?  The Black temp security guard?  Or is it the mysterious Iraq War veteran standing in too-casual cloths?  Along the way, the passengers get killed off one by one, while all attempts at outside rescue get foiled by "Final Destination"-esque freak accidents.  The ultimate identity of our supernatural killer is something that managed to surprise me, a jaded veteran of suspense films who has literally seen it all.  I think you'll be pleasantly surprised as well.  Its a good simple twist, not up to say, "The Sixth Sense" levels, but certainly passable.  Its kind of a formulaic "who done it" plot, but who says there was anything wrong with that?  Its an old plot, but a good plot.

And there are scary moments.  Its been a long time since any Shyamalan works have managed to legitimately scare me.  Watch from the final reveal moment:  that's pretty awesome.  There were roughly seven people in the theatre with me, and there were screams (not from me, of course, don't look at me that way).  Plus the method that the movie takes for killing the characters is actually quite a clever technique.  The lights go out, you see nothing, but can hear the screams and sounds of a struggle in the elevator.  Then when the lights come back on, somebody has been murdered.  You'll never guess who, by the way, which is why I think this movie is so effective.

It isn't perfect. I'll admit that.  The main character of the movie is actually some detective guy who is nowhere near the elevator.  And the whole point of the movie is that you're trapped on the elevator with limited understanding of what's going on outside.  There probably shouldn't have been a single shot of the outside world.  As a matter of fact, a cool idea would have to have the entire movie just be a single angle continuous shot, as if you're watching the security camera footage.  I think that would have made this movie a classic.  Another major issue is that a few outside kills are really predictable.  Like a character seems a sparking wire on a puddle:  how is he going to die?  I'm pretty sure you can guess it.

But the real problem with this movie and its a serious one, is embodied in a single character.  He's the narrator, who tells the audience that the Devil is involved in the proceedings, when I think that should have been a secret the movie should have kept until the final reveal.  But it gets worse.  When the character appears physically, he turns out to be a Hispanic security guard who is watching the security cameras outside the elevator and helping out the detective.  Somehow he manages to piece the entire proceedings together and decides its "¡El Diablo!" in only twenty minutes.  So for the rest of the movie this is guy is preaching and ranting to everybody else, who reasonably think that he's completely nutbars.  In fact, the ¡El Diablo! guy is so bad that he wound up being the funniest thing ever.  He's constantly going on and on, even leading prayers in the elevator at one point, its awful.  But funny as Hell.  Then he goes and demonstrates a test.  If you think ¡El Diablo! is nearby, throw a bit of toast with jam on one side in the air.  If it lands jelly-side down, ¡El Diablo! is here.  I'm not kidding.  A Toast Test.  Another test he recommends is to throw a kid at a table.  If his or her head doesn't hit the table, you're fine, if it does, you better get some holy water.  ¡El Diablo! guy is comedy gold, but he so doesn't belong in this movie.

I think the only reason that people are down on "Devil" is because Shyamalan is involved.  And that's sad.  This is a really decent movie, definitely worth a watch.  I'd go out and see it as quickly as possible, or even wait for a rent.  "The Last Airbender" might be one of the worst movies ever made, but "Devil" sure as Hell is not.  Heck, I might even see the next Night Chronicles movie, if it ever gets made.  There seems to be real potential for a nice long series of decent horror thrillers.  Just keep Shyamalan on a leash and we can have great entertainment for years.  At the very least this was certainly a more fun movie to watch than "The Social Network", which looks absolutely boring.

This was a nice scary way for me to start out October.  Hopefully soon I'll be able to review "Catfish", assuming it gets a real release eventually.  And then comes "Saw VII", which will really cap out the Halloween month in a perfect way.  I can't wait, truly.

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* On the other hand, last year, in fact roughly around the same time, I went to go see "The Box", by Richard Kelly, who I'm pretty sure is the worst creative talent in the history of man.  That had a great Twilight Zone premise... and turned out to be one of the worst movies I've ever seen.  What a Godawful piece of shit.  Don't think that I wasn't ready to walk out on "Devil".  After "The Box", I'm always on my toes for movies turn out to be weird confusing messes of disappointment.