For reasons that must have nothing to do with my stunning lack of popularity, I've never experienced a backlash, but it's an odd phenomenon.
As soon as a popular figure gains any measure of success, naysayers line up to bring him back to earth. "The Dark Knight just wasn't very good," someone will say, moments before drowning on their own drool. I'm sure they believe that — their brains are, after all, the size and solidity of a loogie — but sometimes it feels like some people hate just to be hating.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
On the flip side, sometimes they're just right.
Between The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan looked like permanent box office gold. Each movie he's made since has converted more and more of the movie-going public into people who look like angry dicks on the internet. By this point, I almost feel bad for him. But you know, if he doesn't like it, maybe he should stop being responsible for movies such as Devil.
According to security guard Jacob Vargas' mother, suicides free the devil into our world to wreak havoc and punish the wicked. After a suicide in a Philadelphia office tower, five strangers end up trapped in an elevator 20 floors up.
Detective Chris Messina investigates the suicide, but is called in by security once one of the passengers is assaulted during a blackout. Soon, the captives start dying — and Messina will have to stop the killings without being able to get a hand inside.
Devil is the first of the Night Chronicles, a franchise of movies to be based around the ideas of that guy we're all dogpiling these days, Shyamalan. I like this concept; some talents are clearly better than the rest of us and should be given more opportunities at the expense of those unproven losers who'll probably never amount to anything anyway. It's an odd choice, however, to launch the first of these franchises around a guy who's always been a better director than a writer.
Instead, he hands the directorial reins over to Quarantine's John Erick Dowdle, who gets to grapple with a film whose entire structure hinges around the superstitious narration of a peripherally involved rent-a-cop. That's where all the rules and explanations come from, delivered, usually, just when things are about to stop making sense completely.
Now that's lazy writing. That's so lazy that if it were you it would be fired for laziness, which isn't even possible, because you were already fired for drunkenness. It's just a weak technique — neither the characters nor the audience are figuring anything out for themselves, some jerk's just telling everyone what's what.
This is a major explanation for why the five trapped characters can barely be called "characters." Bokeem Woodbine's work is all right, and Geoffrey Arend registers as some sort of sleazebag — he is, after all, a mattress salesman, and those guys will saw off and sell your left foot if you look away too long — but the others do essentially nothing. They don't seriously try to escape, or deduce who's doing the killing, or even to bond. They do some shouting and some sweating, but what they seem most interested in is standing.
This is making it sound like I totally hated Devil! Somehow, I didn't. Chalk that up to Dowdle's workmanlike direction, which masks these many flaws with a smattering of suspense, a couple of creepy scares and semi-cunning misdirection.
Wait, that's the best praise I've got? All right, now I've talked myself into thinking it's pretty crummy after all. I would have sworn it was OK when I saw it two days ago. Too bad for Devil I had to do whatever it is I did yesterday, because this is a movie that gets worse the more you think about it.
Grade: C-
