It really is shocking just how far M. Night Shamumalun has fallen. When he first burst onto the scene, he did it big. The 6th Sense was a truely great movie, with one of the best ending in cinematic history. He even show promise in his two subsequent films, Unbreakable and Signs. But after that, it just got bad. The Village was boring, Lady in the Water just a vehicle for Mmnight to promote himself (he plays a character who's writing will save the world. Really? Fuck you.), the Happening peaked at the ten minute mark and featured Marky Mark running away from the wind and talking to plants, and The Last Airbender single handedly took one of the best cartoon series of the last decade and made it unwatchable. At this point, the guy had to be humbled. He had flared out before his career really started to begin. And now, he made Devil, easily in the top 3 worst movies he's made.
For the uniformed, Devil is the first part in a planned trilogy of movied dubbed "The Night Chronicles". The concept for this one is, get this, that 5 people get onto a elevator, and one of them... is the devil. So, yeah. It's a 90 minute movie about a 5 annoying ass people that hate each other, while cops watching from a camera (and the audience) try to figure out who the devil is. How do they come to this conclusion? Why, a Mexican Catholic stereotype! Yeesh. You see, instead of having the people in the elevator "discover" one of the others is El Diablo, some guy who vaguely remembers a story his mother told him just come to the conclusion, "Hey, I know, Beelzebub!" *facepalm*
Well, there were some decent parts. The music is actually not bad, with some nice little touches here and there. The cinematography is, like in most M. Night's movies, really damn good. The upside down shot of Philly you see in the trailer is actually a nice sight, especially in HD. Still, there are some niggling issues with this movie, mainly the characters and convenient plot points.
None of the character get a decent backstory, except for the cop. The cop is probably the only character in the story who manages to get past the 1st dimension. They actually did have some planned scenes for the mechanic, old lady, and salesman, but those got cut in the theatrical release. Go figure. But really, they aren't need, as all their character traits can be explained in once sentence. I have never seen so many stereotypical characters NOT in a Michael Bay film. The people you actually want to know about, the people in the elevator, only get maybe 4 or 5 lines of dialogue explaining who they are and why they are being targeted by the devil. Oh wait, no I don't because I hate these people. I hate the old lady because she never talks. I hate the security guard because there just has to be a character with claustrophobia. I hate the mechanic because all he does is start shit. I hate the chick because all she does is bitch and moan. Most of all though, I hate the salesman. Why? Because he gets to have sex with Christina Hendricks, and that sucks for fans of Mad Men and Firefly everywhere.
As a person with a y-chromosome, I have to hate any other person with a y-chromosome who gets to have sex with that.
Still, that even wouldn't have been TOO much of an issue if the actually plot was not littered with lapses in logic. You know how in a slasher flick, you're always yelling at the screen, telling the character to not go into the dark bedroom by themselves, but they do it anyway? Yeah, these people don't think like that. At least 2 people die because they did something so monumentally stupid you actually get stupider just watching it. They try to pull this cop out argument that the Devil doesn't like people interfering with his work, but really its just the writer thinking of something to get him out of the corner he's written himself into.
Shitty quality, I know.
Of course, if this movie was actually written well, trying to figure out who the guy is would be challenging, but no, its obvious. They still cheat, but you can pretty much call it halfway through. I'm not gonna tell, but it really is the easiest thing to decipher in this movie.
The film carries the same themes in Mmmnight's other films, like how were all connected and we all have a predetermined destiny and other spiritual bull, and the film gets down right preachy in the end. Now, to his credit, M. Night didn't actually write it or direct. Sure, he came up with the basic idea, but everything else was done by two other guys: John Erick Dowdle, who directed the equally bad Quarentine, and Brian Nelson, who has written the above par 30 Days of Night and the astoundingly good Hard Candy. So no, this movie doesn't suck because M. Night made it, it's because it's awful.
Still, if you've ran out of episodes of MST3K to watch and you want to try riffing on a movie yourself, Devil isn't a bad pick for it. There are several scenes that are so obnoxious that even Ed Wood would think you were pushing it. Other than that, skip it.
I definitely didn't plan on seeing another M Night film after The Happening, but this sounds just as bad if not worse
