DEVIL Post-Release

That was a pretty great review. I will save watching this for a late night on cable. But the review was fucking aces.

What a great review. I might still go see it in the theater. I don't know. What I do know is that you guys missed a beat by not having the scores be 6 6 6.

Can someone please tell me who the Devil is so I don't have to watch this, ever?

Ha! That's true. I guess that would have been a little too cutsy. So...which one is the Devil? After the review I'm going to guess the Iraq veteran.

Yeah. This just like an extended TV Pilot for an Anthology series. It's not terrible at all. Fairly solid. But It didn't strike me as particularly thought provoking (The SAW Comparison is accurate) or original.

It doesn't help there are only 5 suspects in that elevator. It's definitely not going to be the last 2 people standing for the "twist" to work. I guessed wrong when i watched this but it doesn't really matter as we barely know this people anyway.

Oh yes, remember Wonderfalls? Caroline Dhavernas has a small Police Coroner love interest role here.

Wikipedia has it revealed

Fuck you.

I clearly liked it a lot more than anyone else. Its goofy but its also just a really fun to the point thriller. It does exactly what it sets out to accomplish.

And aside from overbearing religous tones I didn't really see how the directors were aping Night's style.

I wont be seeing this in theaters...but I'll give it a chance when it inevitably shows up on HBO/Showtime/Cinemax/Starz/Encore/whateverthefuckchannel

I dug this alot more than I thought I would.

The drunk driving twist was kinda stupid. But I thought the jumps were decent...especially the old lady standing up with black eyes.

I probably should have seen The Town insted. But I'm not dissapointed I shelled out the cash for this.

That's gold, Jerry. Gold!

Looks like Shyamalan is resigned to making preposterous films. Because this movie has all the hallmarks of one of his films. Even the twist. All the reasons people hate him are in this movie. Anyway I thought it was really awful. And that Mexican security gaurd with his lame exposition, constantly repeating, "Muther always said," was pretty annoying, but I guess the whole movie was annoying.

Thoroughly average, but could have been much worse. The religious elevator guard character was laughable and way overdone, and I absolutely called both the identity of the "devil" and the ultimate revelation about the drunk driving crash (Signs, redux!).

Solid directing, though. I'd be interested in seeing what this guy does AWAY from M. Night. Very definition of a "wait for cable" which I sadly did not do.

Yeah I bet M Night thinks this is a really profound tale of Spirituality and Faith and Blah blah blah. I think the reason people hate on him is his conviction that he's making ART FOR THE AGES instead on pap.

Frankly, I'm just disappointed they didn't have the balls to name this Devilator

Enjoyed this quite a bit.

It didn't aim too high but like Frozen, which I also just saw, I thought it was a well executed, tense, little thriller.

I thought the only flaws were:

- The suicide at the start was not tied into to the main plot other than "it always happens like this", I would have enjoyed a revelation about who/why that person killed themselves. Maybe that could have been the person whose form the Devil then took?

- I also didn't really buy the escalation from "maybe one of them is killing the others" to "its the devil" - the characters seemed to suddenly believe it without any mounting evidence besides than the Mexican's stories...

Overall, recently I have started to more and more enjoy films like Devil, that while not having great ambitions I at least am somewhat surprised by the plot/story. So many major releases are completely straight A to B stories throwing nothing even slightly unexpected at you, that you have to seek out some not necessarily great films like this to get a surprise or two.

A solid matinee that worked a lot better than I though it would.

Dowdle(s?) and Nelson took a simple concept and executed it pretty damn well, and I liked that they kept the pace brisk and the movie short. Night's fingers were all over the spirituality/faith aspects of the story though, but the whodunit plot kept me engaged when that stuff became overbearing(security guard).

I will say that after this I am much more interested in what the Dowdle's and Nelson do next than anything that comes out of "The Night Chronicles".

I like that the annoying exposition guy's praying over the loud speaker doesn't do shit to help the situation.

Didn't get a lot of sleep last night, and I swear I initially read that as " a solid manatee."

Which you have to admit would be something you'd notice if it was in an elevator with you.

This movie was fucking terrible. I can't believe how easy people are going on it. It has an idiotic premise and NOTHING in it makes any goddamn sense. Why does the devil want these already corrupted people? The asinine leap in logic the Hispanic security guy makes to determine that they're dealing with the Devil (the jelly toast...my god the jelly toast..!), the awful "I forgive you" ending...everything about this was total shit. It has Shayamalan's stink all over it, but it didn't actually have any so-bad-it's good entertainment value like THE HAPPENING. This is one of the worst movies of the year.

Before I went to see this, I asked myself the question if I could work out who the Devil was just from the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aINOilb_Kzc

Yes, I did.

Note to people who make trailers, by making one person so much less prominent in the trailers than the others, you might as well put a big neon sign above their head saying I AM THE DEVIL.

Further evidence:

Last guy in as the doors are closing - Too obvious
Guy who talks too much - Too annoying
Bokeem! - Too contentious

Smoking Gun:

The order of the deaths.

Yes, we've all seen/read/know about "And then there were none" by Agatha Christie.

I figured out the identity of the Devil within the first ten minutes. Of course, I was first narrowing down my guesses after the trailer alone, and how one character in particular seemed to be in the background for a curious amount of time. It's made pretty obvious when a certain someone refuses the other available elevator for no apparent reason in the actual film, which I at first thought could have been a clever little attempt to shake up the expectations of the audience, but...no.

I know some people have been praising Devil as a solid little movie with very little ambitions to fault it for not achieving, but I simply can't look past Shyamalan's fingerprints, from the over-expository Catholic security guard to the overcooked "I forgive you!" conclusion. I also fault the direction for going back to the security guards far too much, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but, in my opinion, a more original approach would have been to have them mostly unseen in their communications until the audience learns how to distinguish each outsider from the others. It really took away from the building atmosphere of the elevator, IMO.

Senior, totally agree with you there. If they had approached this a la Buried, where the camera never left the elevator but everything else still happened (though far more condensed) it could have been aces, ratcheting up the tension, the claustrophobia and more importantly, giving the damn people trapped in the elevator something to do while they dick around waiting to be killed.

The use of Exposition Man. Always a sign of desperation and/or ineptitude.

I kind of enjoyed this. Its a brisk 75 minutes and it moves so fast you don't really have time to process how dumb it is. Feels like an extended X-Files episode or something. I liked how it was shot and I liked how everything fit together at the end. And I liked the approaching storm mirroring the escalating action.

It felt like an extended X-Files episode in one of the worst seasons of X-Files, in which you had a feeling that they were creatively lost and yet keep churning out new episodes with the same indifference regardless.

This was easily one of my biggest disappointments with the movie: its conclusion. From the Catholic security guard correctly predicting the involvement of the Devil to the filmmakers playing exactly to the expectations of the most discerning audience members, it just felt rather lazy. If it's a movie that's so brisk that you have difficulty processing its stupidity, then I'd also add that it's a movie that, unlike The Sixth Sense, doesn't nearly hold up as well with repeated viewings once you know its twist because the only efforts to play with the expectations with the audience are so poorly executed.

I would agree with you here wholeheartedly, but the handling of the storyline with the security guards kept bringing the tension to inconsistent levels too often to appreciate this symbolism.

Question here, did I put my foot in it here in this thread? My post with a link to Pendulum music video clip "Other Side" has disappeared. I just mentioned it because coincidentally it seemed to have 'similar themes' (enough so that people were joking in the comments that it was Devil 2).

Now, I am aware that you can't link to pirated material but this was the official record company youtube clip. So is that still a no-no ... or was it being too off topic or something else like being painfully unfunny (again?).

Seriously though, just trying to stay on the right side of the rules here.

 

The jelly on toast line cracked me right up. I wonder if that was unused/retooled dialogue for Hot Dog guy from The Happening? But the funniest thing the Hispanic security guard said was "We have to consider the possibility that one of these people... could be the Devil!" (with a Craig Robinson style fourth wall break, that would have been perfect)
 

This movie was predictable garbage.

I thought this had a chance to be a taught, tightly directed little TWILIGHT ZONE style thriller. Instead, it was mostly just boring (and occasionally unintentionally funny). Also, I guessed the devil correctly from the moment she said she wanted a different elevator even though there was room. Then when the Devil hung herself, for a moment I doubted my assumption, until the police guy took the time to specify that he still was open to the possibility that she was murdering people despite being dead

 

Seriously though, Night, you just should have hired some REAL writers and kept the camera in the elevator. BURRIED was kind of crummy, but it was better than what you cooked up here. You should have kept them in the elevator, and had the voice of the police guy over the speaker turn out to be the devil or something

Finally caught this on cable. My first thought is would it really take that long to get people out of an elevator?  When you consider folks inside are dying and such wouldn't the situation be escalated?

 

The exposition from the security guard was so ridiculous. It would have been more suspenseful to leave that out.

 

Why did the devil let the last guy go? Why didn't the others get a chance to apologize or do penance?

http://apbweb.com/forums/news-5/man-stuck-elevator-41-hours-still-unemployed-after-quitting-job-settling-lawsuit-27259/

 

^ That story was actually scarier than the film. However it should be noted, no one knew that guy was in the elevator and it was a Friday evening. In Devil it's apparently the middle of a workday and the police and authorities are aware quite soon that the people are trapped in the elevator.

Some background, I actually saw a 1 hour documentary on elevators (or as we call them, lifts) and this guy's story was the focus of much of it. First, no thanks to his idiot co-worker who took the time to write a rude missive but never once thought he might have had an accident since he did leave his jacket behind. Then, the fact that the alarm button should have been answered by someone somewhere and yet was not for all that time (that was something his lawsuit never found out, I don't know why they didn't get forced to reveal that, you'd think it would be mandatory that the alarms go to a switchboard where someone saw it). He actually said he got $200,000 when they interviewed him, which sounds all right I guess but given the resulting cost to his life, clearly was not worth it.

 

Here's the kicker though, during much of the time he was trapped in the lift, maintenance were working on several of the other lifts - at the same time. I believe this was over the weekend. They even showed the security split screen with him trapped in one lift and people working on several of the other lifts are shown on the same segment of the recording. With so many people coming and going, it raises some very troubling questions, namely were the people who were supposed to be watching the monitors and answering the alarm buttons goofing off and not at their stations for almost 2 whole days?

 

As for Devil, I seem to remember it was Satan interfering with the rescue attempts or something like that. It's been a while so I don't really remember anything too specific in that department.