81 min., 2010
Directed by John Erick Dowdle
My rating: 
IMDB • Official Site
M. Night Shyamalan’s at it again…sigh…
* * *
Premise
Five people are trapped in an elevator in a high rise, and one of them is murdering the others. Turns out one of them is the devil.
Critique
I almost actually feel sorry for M. Night Shyamalan. The Sixth Sense was actually a pretty good movie, and while it was liked well enough at the time (between The Sixth Sense, The Matrix and The Phantom Menace, 1999 was a great year for movies people are no longer willing to admit they ever liked), its reputation has gradually diminished through a combination of factors. Those who saw the climactic twist as “obvious,” and who judged the entire film as wanting based on that obviousness, gradually came to control the conversation surrounding the film, branding it as “hyped” and “overrated.” Meanwhile, third-act twists became the norm in the thriller genre. And, of course, the rest of Shyamalan’s filmography hasn’t done him any favors. Unbreakable flopped (but has gone on to garner something of a cult following); Signs did better commercially but opinion seems to be rather sharply divided. And the less said about his output from The Village onward, the better. Maybe he can catch a break with Devil, a film he conceived and produced but didn’t actually write or direct?
Well, it’s like this. At the core of Devil there’s thirty, maybe forty minutes of solid material, as the elevator passengers alternate between going to town on each other and trying to figure out who the murderer is. Taken on its own, it’s highly tense and suspenseful, and it would have made a great Twilight Zone–like what “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” might have been if you stuck all the characters in a box. Then you reveal the OMG SHOCK TWIST!, which is that every so often the devil arranges for a bunch of assholes to gather together somewhere and picks them off one by one.
However, the first thing we’re told is that “the Devil roams the Earth” and “Sometimes…he would take human form so he could punish the damned on Earth before claiming their souls. The ones he chose would be gathered together and tortured as he hid amongst them, pretending to be one of them.” Those lines are spoken by Ramirez, a devout security guard whose entire plot function is to explain the rules of the game to the other characters and thus, by extension, us. It’s almost as if Shyamalan intends to short-circuit criticism of the twist by explaining, right up front, what the twist is. Of course, it completely derails the “mystery” aspect of the story; there’s no point in trying to figure out what’s going on since Ramirez is going to tell us ten minutes before it actually happens anyway.
If that’s the injury, then the character of Ramirez himself is the insult. He’s supremely annoying–he’s very much your stock superstitious Latino Catholic who says “Madre de Dios” a lot and sees the image of the Virgin Mary in slices of toast–and his shtick gets old quick. It’s like watching one of the late-season episodes of Lost where they were having a half-price sale on everything happens for a reason. Just to hammer home the point, the film’s weighed down by heavy-handed symbolism–for example, the building number where all of this takes place is 333, because of course it is. The characters are forgettable and the dialogue is overwrought.
Director John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine) manages to almost salvage what he’s given and turn in a watchable film. He puts a lot of work into disorienting the audience and keeping it on its toes. He makes some bizarre choices that actually work (the opening sequence is an aerial pan over the city of Pittsburgh, but it’s presented upside-down), directs with a certain amount of playful flair, and makes great use of his locations. The cast is solid if unremarkable–Jacob Vargas (as Ramirez) really only stands out because his character’s so goddamn annoying. I do have to say, however, that it’s nice to see Matt Craven again–he’s one of the few things I liked about Happy Birthday to Me.
The really disappointing thing about Devil is that it’s not a total loss. If it were completely bad, I would have no problem consigning it to one of my lousy movie piles (I have one pile for movies that are fun to mock and another for movies that should be destroyed and never spoken of again) and leaving it at that. But for all of Devil’s problems, the biggest one is simply that it could have been a hell of a lot better.