Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
10/3/10
Love
him or hate him, M. Night Shayamalan is among the most iconic filmmakers
of his time. Since bursting onto the scene with The Sixth Sense,
he's become synonymous with a very specific filmmaking style and series
of themes no one would confuse with anyone else's work. Dozens of
lesser filmmakers have tried to replicate his school of twist-and-turn-packed
supernatural tension without success, and some fans might suggest that
Shayamalan himself has struggled to replicate his own success over the
last few years (I will simply refer to you my own torching of The
Last Airbender rather than recap any of it here). Be that as
it may, he's a guy who stands for a certain kind of genre filmmaking, and
as such I'm surprised it took this long for him to try and franchise it
out in the way Stephen Spielberg did with Amblin Entertainment and Dreamworks
and Wes Craven did by slapping his name as “presenter” on every third movie
Dimension Films released in the years following Scream. The
Night Chronicles represents Shayamalan's effort to deliver a kind of
cinematic Twilight Zone: a series of low-budget films crafted
by other established filmmakers based upon stories he wrote himself.
First up: Devil, which strands five strangers on an elevator
and lets very bad things happen to them while the maintenance staff and
a troubled detective try to puzzle the whole thing out. The result,
from the keyboard of 30 Days of Night
scripter Brian Nelson and the lens of Quarantine's John Eric Dowdle,
is spooky, spiritual and memorably twisty in the style of Night's best
work while finding some time to revel in the love of clumsy fairy tales
that mars his worst. Still, give Devil its due: this
is a fun, clever B movie that gets in, delivers the goods and gets out
in a clean 80 minutes without getting all mannered or pretentious.
The
Night Chronicles could be just the M. Night Lite his haggard fans could
use right about now.
Just
another day in a downtown Philadelphia office building when a man leaps
to his death from his office. Detective Bowden (Chris Messina), just
putting his life back together after the tragic deaths of his wife and
child years before, is called in to investigate. One of that building's
elevators stalls with five people inside. Technicians Lustig (Matt
Craven) and Ramirez (Jacob Vargas) watch through their security cameras,
able to talk to the elevator, but unable to hear anything going on inside.
Its occupants are a security Guard (Bokeem Woodbine), a Young Woman (Bojana
Novakovic), an Old Woman (Jenny O'Hara), an annoying Salesman (Geoffrey
Arend), and a Mechanic (Logan Marshall-Green). At first, they simply
get on each other's nerves, but when the power begins to cut out erratically,
the lights start going on and off. Each time the elevator is plunged
into darkness, something bad happens, and soon people begin to die.
Repairman Dwight (Joe Codben) doesn't have a lot of luck fixing it and
Bowden struggles to figure out what's happening. But Ramirez knows:
his grandmother told him all about how the Devil gathers guilty souls,
hides among them, and punishes them to prove his power before a chosen
audience. But just which one of these five people is the Devil, and
why has he chosen Bowden to witness his grand design?
Devil's
Agatha Christie-inspired setup is a proven winner, and Nelson's script
introduces you to everyone so efficiently that it's easy to miss the fact
that we don't know anyone's name. Because the movie cuts back and
forth between events in and out of the elevator, it isn't the claustrophobic
pressure cooker it could be, but it's also not really the story of the
trapped souls. It's Bowden's story, and if you think too hard about
the little details, you'll probably figure out why. I can proudly
say I guessed the Devil's identity, but the revelation that connects the
Detective to these events did catch my by surprise because I was sufficiently
engaged in the story. It is, as I mentioned, a nice, tight little
Twilight
Zone exercise, albeit more in the spirit of the 80's J. Michael Strazynski
revival than the Rod Serling original.
Shayamalan's
fans will recognize the stalwart, broken-hearted hero, the theme of the
adventure as spiritual test and a couple of substantial third act reversals.
Sadly, they'll also recognize the utterly clunky business of Ramirez narrating,
talking to Bowden and generally annoying anyone who'll listen with his
“stories” of the Devil doing his thing. Yes, yes, his Grandmother
told him stories, we get it, but presumably she was also in contact with
Shayamalan, because those “stories” are nothing but a vague excuse for
Ramirez to lay out a road map of what's going on and where the story is
headed. Poor Messina has to do his best to sell lines like “If these
stories of yours are true, how do I save these people?” It's a device
that would work a lot better in a half-hour TV show, where we could better
appreciate the time constraints forcing narrative shortcuts, than an 80-minute
movie, but either way, the film chokes on the dreaded “stories” every time
they come up.
In
classic B-movie style, performances are good enough to get the job done,
even if you can feel the actors saving their high gear for a more worthy
project. Messina feels really lived-in as Bowden, and I not only
got the sense that he really does do this job every day, but that he does
it well. While it's not much of a role, the under-employed Caroline
Dhavernas does a great job with very little time suggesting the new relationship
that's allowing him to just begin to move on with his life. True
to the story's design, none of the people in the elevator is a fully fleshed-out
character: we need to be able to believe that each of them could
be the Devil or a victim at all times, and revelations that come out about
them as we proceed need to feel organic to the people we think we know.
As such, the actors are required to play EXTREMELY close to the vest without
being dull and for the most part, all succeed. Also unemployed Matt
Craven puts in solid work in a role that's nothing but exposition, but
Vargas gets eaten alive as anyone would be by the dreadful mix of exposition
and nonsense that is Ramirez.
Devil
won't
change your life, rank among the best movies of the year or be long-remembered
among the movies with which M. Night Shayamalan has been associated.
But he could also learn something from its simple efficiency and you could
do a lot worse than this zippy B-movie. I'm told that next year's
Night Chronicles entry (tentatively titled Reincarnate) will
concern a jury debating a supernatural case, and the following year will
be a sequel of sorts to Shayamalan's memorable Unbreakable.
And unlike the trepidation with which I approach the auteur's next turn
behind the camera, I approach both with a lot of enthusiasm. The
world needs more good B-movies. And fewer Airbenders. |
