Devil (2010)

Trailer:

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s It About: Five people get into an elevator and one of them is the Devil, for some reason, and the Devil really pushes the other people’s buttons, which is wrong on many levels. 

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• With a name like Devil you just don’t know what you’re getting.
• Holy FUCK the opening shots of Philadelphia are GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING UPSIDE DOWN!!!! DON’T YOU REALIZE WHAT THIS MEANS???!!!  Because I don’t. It’s pretty stupid.
• I’m old enough to remember when M. Night Shyamalan wasn’t a complete joke. Although I personally hate The Sixth Sense. Most of Signs was pretty good. And parts of Unbreakable. But I’ve probably written three or four good posts on this site, doesn’t mean I’m not a total hack.
• So from what I understand of the premise, five people are trapped in an elevator and one of them is supposed to be the Devil. One dude has the face of a demon and is wearing a bright red tie, so of course you’re automatically going to suspect him, but anyone who has seen a movie before and has one-tenth of a functioning brain knows that’s a literal red herring. So it’s incredibly obvious it’s the unsuspecting older woman. Why do I need to watch the rest of this? If I’m wrong on that theory I’ll eat a package of Devil Dicks, which I assume is some kind of spicy gator jerky they make in Mississippi.
• If you were stuck in an elevator, would you really talk that much, or just wait?
• This one guy in the elevator is like a homeless man’s Jai Courtney, who’s the poor man’s Tom Hardy, who’s the middle-class man’s Bruce Boxleitner.

An actor so good that he convinced the Devil to sell him his soul.

• Why is a mattress salesman going up a skyscraper? Lot of bedrooms up there?
• Oooh it’s elevator 6. Did a 3 year old write this?
• The one saving grace of this picture so far is that the Latino security guard isn’t played by Michael Peña.
• This movie is about as suspenseful as hoping the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru gets your order correct. Actually, at least you get something out of that at the end.
• Was this like an experiment to see if a movie can be made with zero character development?
• I love all this fighting and tension when they’ve been stuck in an elevator for about 20 minutes.

• So the power goes out, the mirror in the elevator shatters, and then the red herring mattress guy has a shard stuck in his neck. He’s dead and no one in heaven or hell gives one sweet fuck.
• Not Michael Peña: “How many times have you seen a child fall and barely miss the edge of a table with their head?” Uh, zero? What the fuck are you talking about?
• Why would the Devil waste his time with this scenario?
• It’s pretty rare that a movie conjures up such emotion in me: complete, total, utter indifference.
• I could have written this movie in my sleep when I was 7 because I used to piss the bed and it’s the same difference.
• So Tom Hardy Lite, who for some reason everyone thinks is the killer just because he used to be a marine, tries to go up through the ceiling of the elevator and the younger woman screams that he’s trying to escape. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??? If he’s not a killer he’s trying to help, and if he is then he’ll be away from you and, you know, not kill you. Plus, even if he is trying to escape, where’s he gonna go? Is he going to hide in the air ducts of the building until the cops just give up searching for him? Jesus H. Christ…
• Maybe the Devil made this fucking movie to torture mankind. Unfortunately for the devil, only 665 people have seen it… oops, make that 666…
• I bet I can search for “scary elevator” on YouTube and find something 666,000 times more watchable than this.

• Chris Messina. Remember that name, for he is to acting what the McRib is to haute cuisine. He’ll never be on Bruce Boxleitner’s level, I’ll tell you that.
• It always amazes me. Movies have budgets, actors, crew, distributors, etc. You could have all those things at your disposal and make something like Reservoir Dogs or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Rear Window. Or you could make this, and waste everyone’s time, and damn yourself to the fires of Hades.
• I just realized I’ve barely discussed the actual movie here, but that’s because there’s literally nothing to discuss. It’s like seeing a piece of old dog shit on the sidewalk. What would you have to say about it? You’d just briefly acknowledge it exists and move on with your life. Although cleaning dog shit off the bottom of your shoe for 80 minutes would be a more pleasant use of your time. So would eating it.
• Ohhhhhh it’s the older woman. I’m more shocked than John Coffey in The Green Mile.
• Ohhh Not Tom Hardy vehicular manslaughtered a family and I don’t caaaaaaaaaaare.
• Ohhhhhhh it was the cop’s family IIIIIIII DOOOOOON’T CAAAAAAARRRRRE.
• I guess that was the big patented Shyamalan twist. And it involved two people with backstories that are strictly “Ex-marine” and “Dead family.”
  

Scare Level: There are kind of two jump scares with weird Devil faces, which may frighten you if you’ve never walked down the seasonal Halloween section at a Walmart. 

Gore Level: Most of it is when the mattress salesman gets a shard in the neck, and that amount of blood is extremely difficult to get out of a mattress… I mean, so I hear…

Nudity Level: At the end the old deviled woman strips fully nude and rubs blood all over her body for a good solid 15 minutes… or was I daydreaming that?

Best Line: “Why don’t you suck a butt?” And this script was overlooked at Oscar time? 

Best Scene: I guess when the random person jumped to their death because I could identify.

Worst Scene: Oh boy. You know what’s kind of weird? This movie really doesn’t have scenes, it’s basically one long, tortuous scene that just goes back and forth between the elevator and the police looking at the elevator. And it’s precisely as thrilling and engrossing as that sounds.

Level of Hell: Not quite on the Fraud level because I wasn’t expecting much with the name M. Night Shyamalan tied to it, but I can’t slot it into Treachery because I just didn’t care about it. So Heresy seems ideal for this waste of time and energy.

Overall: For a movie set in an elevator, I was expecting a lot of ups and downs, but I seriously could have watched lift cables getting greased for an hour and 20 minutes and gotten just as much entertainment out of it. I think they were going for some kind of The Thing vibe here with these trapped people becoming paranoid with each other but it fails just as miserably as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest where he showed up and nobody was there and he realized that he got the dates mixed up and the ass-kicking contest is next Saturday but he can’t make it because that’s his sister’s wedding day. Maybe it’s just me and I have a weird sensibility in that I find it impossible to like movies that have no likable characters or any reason to even care about them, so when they die or anything at all happens to them it registers just as highly as you smashing an ant that’s crawling on your kitchen countertop.

It’s also interesting to note that Devil was intended to be the first in a spooky trilogy of terror and suspense known as The Night Chronicles, but that went nowhere since Devil turned out to be hot garbage. There is a title for the supposed second film, Reincarnate (which I guess is another Devil reference), but there is literally no information on its IMDb page. So don’t hold the door waiting for that to happen. But as for Devil, I’d only recommend it to the most hardcore of elevator enthusiasts.

Score: 2 Children Barely Missing the Edge of a Table with Their Heads (out of 10)