M. Night Shyamalan ("Watch out for that tree!") is
back, but as a producer and creator of the story for Devil. Which is about…the
devil. Five people get on an elevator in Philly (sounds like the beginning of a
bad joke, doesn’t it?) but one of them is Old Scratch, looking to collect souls
of the damned. The elevator gets stuck in a modern day office high rise in the
middle of the work day, and the film actually doesn’t ignore the fact that there
would be surveillance cameras watching the people inside. By including the POV
of an army of police and firefighters, who’re all determined to extract these
poor souls from the jaws of hell, Devil wisely avoids being just a
claustrophobic, one-room-only thriller.
A good cast of actors (Jenny O’Hara, Bokeem Woodbine, Bojana Novakovic, Geoffrey
Arend and Logan Marshall-Green) keeps the excitement in the elevator going at a
fever pitch while Chris Messina plays a resolute Philly detective who’s trying
to rescue these folks while not listening to the overly-religious security
guard--who just knows it’s the devil’s work because he listened to the stories
his psychopathic mother told him as a little boy. Messina’s cop tries hard to
solve the case using good old fashioned police work, but that starts to fall
through when the people in the elevator start getting killed one by one in some
really bizarre fashion, all while on camera.
Devil is basically a horror movie for people who hate horror movies, such as in the
annoying way that the lights always go out just as the devil strikes. All the
better to keep the real identity of the devil among the elevator riders a secret,
but the viewer is reduced to a long interval of
sheer blackness while the actors scream hysterically. Another annoying aspect of
the film is the overwrought music score, which tries too hard to create the scares
that just aren't on the screen. The religiously inclined might like this one, because it ultimately
promotes "wholesome" values. But it's a pretty mild ride for the average horror
movie fan.
--SF
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