Devil Review

Director: John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine)
Screenplay: Brian Nelson (30 Days of Night)
Story: M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Lady in the Water, The Last Airbender)
Starring: Chris Messina (Julie and Julia, Greenberg), Logan Marshall-Green (Dark Blue), Jenny O'Hara, Bojana Novakovic, Bokeem Woodbine, and Geoffery Arned
Gross Revenue: $44,683,045 worldwide (As of 11/1/10)
Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter: 50%
IMDB Rating: 6.6
     Everyone loves to see a good movie.  There is nothing quite like that feeling one gets after a great and entertaining piece of cinema art.  That being said, sometimes it can be more fun to see a terrible movie, especially in groups.  It can be fun to mock the poor quality of the movie, such as the bad acting, the atrocious premise, the shoddy effects, and just the general blandness of the film.  The kind of movie best described as "trash" but can be fun to see in a group.  Unfortunately, Devil doesn't even fall into that category.  It is neither to good enough to stand on it's own, nor is it bad enough to warrant group mockery.  It resides in a strange middle ground between good, and so bad its good.  Devil, is just bad.

     Devil is the first of M Night. Shyamalan's planned "Night Chronicles" series, which are movies that he produces, but doesn't direct or write (Thank God), and are based off an original story of his own creation.  Devil is about 5 strangers who become trapped in an elevator, and they start to realize that one of them may be the devil himself.  Pretty straightforward, and nothing happens in this film that one doesn't see coming a mile away.  An intriguing premise that could have been a suspenseful thriller that meditated on the religion vs. science debate, that ended up being a big bore.

     This movie's biggest flaw is that it is just boring.  There's an attempt by the filmmakers to give some of the characters some emotional depth, but it is a failure, and all the characters just represent really bad stereotypes or archetypes.  The acting, if it can be even called that and not "line reading", doesn't help.  There are no break out performances, or anything that can be called a "performance".  I felt absolutely no sympathy for these characters, and I was even excited when they started getting killed off.  People will gripe and complain about how it is a horror movie and that the characters are supposed to be and stupid, I disagree with these people.  In order for a movie to be truly scary, one has to be concerned for the fates of the onscreen characters.  Modern day horror films have a tendency to assemble a cast of good-looking idiotic people and have scared/tortured/chased by some serial killer/monster, but this is completely unnecessary.  Being a "horror" film, if Devil can even be called horror, does not require boring characters.  There is no excuse except lazy writing.

    Devil can barely be called a horror film.  Despite modern horror's tendency to just gross out the audience instead of truly frighten them, horror movies are supposed to, simply put, scare the audience.  The only thing scary about Devil is that someone gave M. Night Shyamalan money to make another movie.  Seriously Hollywood, stop.  The movie takes a different approach to most modern horror flicks, and is more of a suspense horror then a gore horror.  It uses more traditional techniques that made movies of an older generation so scary and so popular.  Due to the inadequacy of the directing however, the movie still resorts to cheap tricks in order to scare the audience, and very few of them last longer then a few seconds, if they even succeed at all.  So what is is a horror film without scares?  Exactly, nothing.  It is just a bunch of people talking about how scary what's happening on screen is, even though nobody in the audience is scared at all.
It becomes a dull "talking heads" movie, and no one wants to watch those.

    Now I don't watch many horror movies, but even I can tell the difference between a good one and a bad one.  And Devil is not a good movie.  I can't even recommend it to see in a group and make fun of it.  It's not so bad its good, its just bad, which is a far worse crime.  There is nothing redeemable about this movie, and I can honestly say it was a waste of time for me to see it.  It's not disgustingly atrociously awfully terrible, it's just very very dull and boring, which in some ways is worse.  It's a well-crafted experiment in curing insomnia.  In summary, Devil is a wasted effort by M. Night Shyamalan to use traditional horror techniques in a modern flick, which ultimately ends up being one of the blandest films and least scary films of the year.  1.5/5
"Everyone believes in him a little bit, even people like you who say they don't".