1) Devil Wastes a Ton of Time on Things that Aren't Important
Horror movies have hit a pretty gruesome rut lately. They're all either slashers, torture porn or bad ghost stories. Or J-Pop. Some movies have managed to buck this trend like Tucker and Dale vs. Evil which gloriously mocks slasher films completely. Oh but it's not really horror, is it? The Woman in Black does a pretty good job using classic horror stylings to present a decent horror flick. Still, the genre hasn't had any game changers in quite a while.
Along comes Devil, going to revolutionize the genre, right? I mean, the guy clearly understands horror, right? He had The Sixth Sense and... well... Signs wasn't bad, I guess. Then he had The Happening- okay, yeah I have no hope for this movie.
The movie starts off showing us a suicide where a person falls on a van. We then find the detectives investigating the "crime scene" (is it really a crime? They already know it's a jumper. They say so themselves.) when one of them realizes, this isn't really the crime scene! No, the van must have rolled after having a body fall on it because apparently, bodies hitting the roof of your car will make your E-brakes stop working. The detective says, no, it couldn't have been this tiny building. They had to have jumped from that skyscraper because it's tall! "Oh, but... detective... maybe they jumped from that other skyscraper just over th-" NO!
The partner is apparently the only intelligent one in this group as he points out that the van is now at a different angle than the building's parking. Don't you know anything, silly, silly partner with no name? These construction barriers are meant to deflect trucks! Therefore, the van obviously hit this angled barrier and bounced into the driveway. Duh. Physics for the win! Oh and don't worry that it didn't hit another car during the morning rush hour in the middle of city, it was just luck.
So, off we go to the building where the van came from and find that a window is broken way high up above. Some janitor is cleaning up glass outside with a broom (because that's the efficient way to clean up giant shards of glass) when they ask him if a window broke. No, of course not Officer, I always just come outside in the morning, smash some glass on the ground and spend the rest of the day cleaning it up. Next question, does the window face this direction? Are you fucking stupid??? You are stepping in broken glass on the ground underneath a building with a hole in it, what do you think?
So we're 20 minutes into the movie at this point when suddenly, the director remembered this is a horror movie. Cue giant pane of glass falling directly on the cops! Oh no! Whew, diving main character saves the day, immediately is back on his feet in the next scene and says, you better secure that scene and walks away. I can't even- I can't- I just can't. Moving on.
Let's go up to the scene of the "crime" where there's a giant hole in a pane of glass. Fun fact about glass in large buildings, they're designed to not shatter. I'm not saying that they wouldn't shatter when they hit the ground from 300 feet up, I don't know, but the force of someone hurling themselves at a glass pane in a modern skyscraper would, at best, take the whole pane with it. Just saying. So anyway, we now have determined that, yes, indeed, this is a big hole in the pane of glass and something may or may not have fallen from it. Great police work folks! Let's call it a day.
That's literally it before we are introduced to people stuck in the elevator. That was 30 minutes of an 80 minute movie and do you know what it has to do with the rest of the movie? NOTHING. The suicide is literally never mentioned again for the rest of the film and nothing regarding the big ass hole in the glass or the glass on the ground ever comes up again. Thanks for wasting all our time!
2) Devil isn't Scary
When I said above that this movie avoids horror cliches, I really meant it. In fact, it avoids the biggest cliche of all in horror films: being scary. So we're thirty minutes into the damn movie and literally nothing important has happened at all but now, we have five folks stuck on an elevator together hanging up 20-some floors above open space. If that description didn't scare you, congratulations! You can make it through this whole movie without so much as a shudder. Because that's basically all that happens for most of the movie. They keep telling you how they're in an elevator high up on the building, as though we were too stupid to remember it from 5 minutes earlier when they told us the last time.
Every so often, as though on a timer, the lights flicker and one of the folks winds up dead. Of course, this all happens in the pitch black of the elevator so for us watching along at home, we just get to sit at darkness for thirty seconds, hear some sound effects that don't seem at all related to what's going on, and then wait to see who died.
Maybe this premise would be scary if we cared at all about the people on the elevator but we really don't. None of them are interesting in the least primarily because we learn almost nothing about any of them. There's a black security guard (yes, it is worth mentioning his race because all he is is a series of "oh, no you didn't." and "ah hell no."), a war vet who kinda looks like Chris Pratt, a girl with fancy clothes, an old woman who whines and an indian dude who wants to sell you mattresses. This is not a joke, I literally told you everything we learn about every character in the entire movie. That, and they all are jerks.
3) Stupid, Pointless Death Scenes
Remember that Devil is a horror movie. That means, fools gotta die. Apparently the five people getting knocked off in the elevator wasn't enough for them so they added a few extra death scenes outside of the elevator. These play out basically like watching the kids from Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. One guy is going down to the elevator when he falls and dies. Another moron decides touching the pool of water with sparks flying out of it looks like fun. Not only are these not scary in the least but they are completely pointless to the storyline. They don't hinder anyone nor do they accomplish anything and the deaths both seem like either an accident or stupidity. When was the last time you got scared reading The Darwin Awards?
4) The Twist!
Our good buddy M. Night wrote this piece of trash so it's got to have a twist in it. Turns out that the old woman who died early on is actually the Devil! This may have been scary if the hispanic guy hasn't been telling us this for literally the whole damn movie. So when it happens and the old lady gets back up with all black eyes, it's not scary so much as affirming since it's what most of us guessed anyway.
Getting out of this movie for a minute, this has been M. Night's problem since the beginning. He loves his plot twists but doesn't seem to understand how they work at all. For a twist to work, it has to be something foreshadowed or hiding in plain sight so that when you watch it a second time, you realize all the things leading up to that which you just missed. Look at Sixth Sense which literally tells you the twist at the beginning and then tricks you into doubting what you learned. Look at Fight Club which has you making assumptions that you know what you're seeing when you really don't. These movies understand the art of the twist. M. Night just throws random curveballs that come out of nowhere and don't feel as they have any oomph because they're basically just deus ex machinas.
Well, we find out that our sole survivor was the one responsible for killing the main character's family which he hasn't been able to stop talking about for a while now. Bummer. But it's cool because he forgives the elevator guy and the Devil says, "Damn" and disappears. The end. That's all folks.
There is a message though, in all of this nonsense. A universal lesson that we should all take to heart after watching this film. We need to make better choices about what movies to watch.
Every so often, as though on a timer, the lights flicker and one of the folks winds up dead. Of course, this all happens in the pitch black of the elevator so for us watching along at home, we just get to sit at darkness for thirty seconds, hear some sound effects that don't seem at all related to what's going on, and then wait to see who died.
Maybe this premise would be scary if we cared at all about the people on the elevator but we really don't. None of them are interesting in the least primarily because we learn almost nothing about any of them. There's a black security guard (yes, it is worth mentioning his race because all he is is a series of "oh, no you didn't." and "ah hell no."), a war vet who kinda looks like Chris Pratt, a girl with fancy clothes, an old woman who whines and an indian dude who wants to sell you mattresses. This is not a joke, I literally told you everything we learn about every character in the entire movie. That, and they all are jerks.
3) Stupid, Pointless Death Scenes
Remember that Devil is a horror movie. That means, fools gotta die. Apparently the five people getting knocked off in the elevator wasn't enough for them so they added a few extra death scenes outside of the elevator. These play out basically like watching the kids from Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. One guy is going down to the elevator when he falls and dies. Another moron decides touching the pool of water with sparks flying out of it looks like fun. Not only are these not scary in the least but they are completely pointless to the storyline. They don't hinder anyone nor do they accomplish anything and the deaths both seem like either an accident or stupidity. When was the last time you got scared reading The Darwin Awards?
4) The Twist!
Our good buddy M. Night wrote this piece of trash so it's got to have a twist in it. Turns out that the old woman who died early on is actually the Devil! This may have been scary if the hispanic guy hasn't been telling us this for literally the whole damn movie. So when it happens and the old lady gets back up with all black eyes, it's not scary so much as affirming since it's what most of us guessed anyway.
Getting out of this movie for a minute, this has been M. Night's problem since the beginning. He loves his plot twists but doesn't seem to understand how they work at all. For a twist to work, it has to be something foreshadowed or hiding in plain sight so that when you watch it a second time, you realize all the things leading up to that which you just missed. Look at Sixth Sense which literally tells you the twist at the beginning and then tricks you into doubting what you learned. Look at Fight Club which has you making assumptions that you know what you're seeing when you really don't. These movies understand the art of the twist. M. Night just throws random curveballs that come out of nowhere and don't feel as they have any oomph because they're basically just deus ex machinas.
Well, we find out that our sole survivor was the one responsible for killing the main character's family which he hasn't been able to stop talking about for a while now. Bummer. But it's cool because he forgives the elevator guy and the Devil says, "Damn" and disappears. The end. That's all folks.
There is a message though, in all of this nonsense. A universal lesson that we should all take to heart after watching this film. We need to make better choices about what movies to watch.
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