Recently, I finished watching Devil. I say 'finished', because at one point I literally had to stop watching. It got to be just too dumb and awful for me to take at the late hour I had been watching it. By the end, I honestly felt as if the filmmakers had been laughing at me behind me back the whole time.
The basic 'plot' (what there is of it) revolves around a small assortment of people who become trapped in an elevator. After security guards and the police become involved, we learn that The Devil is actually amongst them in the elevator. And that's pretty much it.
To be fair, this isn't such a bad concept - even with little actual plot, this could have been an entertaining story with the use of implied plot occurrences and extensive character development. But Devil offers neither of these.
Nothing is shown to ever actually happen in Devil, nor is anything really implied. The cause of this is the quickly-tiresome methodology of turning off the lights in the elevator and supplying the pitch darkness with barely audible shuffling. And when the lights come on, we see that either someone is dead, or they're not. If that sounds lazy, it's because it is. This sort of thing happens constantly throughout the movie, removing all sense of tension from it and making it an expected thing (the exact wrong thing to do in a suspense film), and after the third time, it just becomes tedious. Aside from that, the plot never really goes anywhere, or has any sense of succession. People die, the cops are trying to get it but can't, people die, and on and on and on.
And even with those flaws, the movie could still have been salvaged a bit if the character development had just been well done. But again, Devil fails horribly through laziness. Throughout the movie, we learn snippets about the characters through throwaway dialogue between policemen, concerning crimes they've committed. None of this is very memorable, however, as these pieces of character information seem to become irrelevant. We spend so little time with the police, who figure these facts out and then seem to promptly forget they matter, and most of the time with the elevator folk, who don't know these facts about each other and just act against each other out of fear and spite as they die off one by one. The movie doesn't care why these people are bad (aside from the final person), and doesn't give us any reason to.
Other aspects of the film fail as well. All of the acting feels like performances out of a student film. There's no musical score to speak of, and when you do hear any music, it's usually very monotonic or exploitative. The cinematography of the film is often uninspired and repetitive, and it lacks any sort of visual flair whatsoever.
And then there's the ending. This is perhaps the point of the movie that causes the worst taste in my mouth. Some may remember that the story was written by M. Night Shyamalan, famous for his 'surprise-ending' movies, such as The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, and The Happening. As such, one would expect Devil to have a twist ending. But no. Oh, no, my friends. Devil, in point of fact, has about six ending 'twists' from what I can judge. I won't spoil them for you, but suffice to say that each 'twist' becomes more senseless and silly than the previous one.
Overall, Devil is a poorly, poorly made movie. It's boring, it's dumb (Jelly toast landing jellied side down is used to establish that The Devil is in the elevator. Seriously.), and it's far too long for its lack of substance. If The Devil ever comes for me, I hope to God he picks a way of doing it that won't put me to sleep.
The basic 'plot' (what there is of it) revolves around a small assortment of people who become trapped in an elevator. After security guards and the police become involved, we learn that The Devil is actually amongst them in the elevator. And that's pretty much it.
To be fair, this isn't such a bad concept - even with little actual plot, this could have been an entertaining story with the use of implied plot occurrences and extensive character development. But Devil offers neither of these.
Nothing is shown to ever actually happen in Devil, nor is anything really implied. The cause of this is the quickly-tiresome methodology of turning off the lights in the elevator and supplying the pitch darkness with barely audible shuffling. And when the lights come on, we see that either someone is dead, or they're not. If that sounds lazy, it's because it is. This sort of thing happens constantly throughout the movie, removing all sense of tension from it and making it an expected thing (the exact wrong thing to do in a suspense film), and after the third time, it just becomes tedious. Aside from that, the plot never really goes anywhere, or has any sense of succession. People die, the cops are trying to get it but can't, people die, and on and on and on.
And even with those flaws, the movie could still have been salvaged a bit if the character development had just been well done. But again, Devil fails horribly through laziness. Throughout the movie, we learn snippets about the characters through throwaway dialogue between policemen, concerning crimes they've committed. None of this is very memorable, however, as these pieces of character information seem to become irrelevant. We spend so little time with the police, who figure these facts out and then seem to promptly forget they matter, and most of the time with the elevator folk, who don't know these facts about each other and just act against each other out of fear and spite as they die off one by one. The movie doesn't care why these people are bad (aside from the final person), and doesn't give us any reason to.
Other aspects of the film fail as well. All of the acting feels like performances out of a student film. There's no musical score to speak of, and when you do hear any music, it's usually very monotonic or exploitative. The cinematography of the film is often uninspired and repetitive, and it lacks any sort of visual flair whatsoever.
And then there's the ending. This is perhaps the point of the movie that causes the worst taste in my mouth. Some may remember that the story was written by M. Night Shyamalan, famous for his 'surprise-ending' movies, such as The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, and The Happening. As such, one would expect Devil to have a twist ending. But no. Oh, no, my friends. Devil, in point of fact, has about six ending 'twists' from what I can judge. I won't spoil them for you, but suffice to say that each 'twist' becomes more senseless and silly than the previous one.
Overall, Devil is a poorly, poorly made movie. It's boring, it's dumb (Jelly toast landing jellied side down is used to establish that The Devil is in the elevator. Seriously.), and it's far too long for its lack of substance. If The Devil ever comes for me, I hope to God he picks a way of doing it that won't put me to sleep.