Because everything else that sounded interesting was in 3D (which makes me ill) we decided to give Devil a try.  Written by M. Night Shyamalan and directed by John Dowdle, this horror/suspense movie was merely average.

We start out by listening to the narrator tell us a story his mom used to tell him.  The basic gist of it is that when a person commits suicide, it opens a gate for the devil to get through.  The devil will then have a grand old time killing people trapped in a confined space while spectators watch powerless to stop it.  Then, we immediately see someone commit suicide.

At this point you know what's going to happen and silently cringe when you see five people enter an elevator in the same building the person committed suicide. These people are a temp guard (Bokeem Woodbine, a young woman (Bojana NovaKovic), a mechanic (Logan Marshall-Green, an older woman (Jenny O'Hara), and an annoying slimy salesman (Geoffrey Arend).  Everything seems normal until their elevator stumbles to a halt.  The lights start acting up, music starts playing for no good reason, and every time it turns dark, someone dies.  They all think the worst of each other, never really knowing what is happening to them.  Detective Bowden (Chris Messina) and Ramirez our narrator (Jacob Vargas) watch on and try to rescue these people from their plight.

For a horror movie, I was thankful that they kept the gore to a minimum.  The killings were also very low key due to the dark that kept happening in the elevator as well.  This was a little better for the more squeamish who might decide to watch this movie.  It centered more around plot in this case, which is some ways was good and some ways was bad.  Certainly it was better to have a story rather than a random killing spree, but in actuality, the story was somewhat boring.  Having been told what was going to happen originally by the narrator, you were just watching events play out instead of trying to guess what would happen next.

There was some music in this movie.  However, being that it was in an elevator, it was elevator music, and only one song played sporadically through most of the movie.  There might have been some other music during other scenes, but i don't recall it so if there was it wasn't noticeable. 

The actors were decent.  Jenny O'Hara is kind of always an odd ball character to me and she didn't surprise me by venturing out of that role for this film.  The rest of the actors were new to me so I didn't have a standing opinion of any of them.  Now after the movie was over, I still don't.  They did well enough, it was just going back to the fact that the plot was somewhat slow that I think they didn't have a great opportunity to really dazzle us with their acting.

I probably won't go rushing out to buy this movie.  I might not even volunteer to see it again.  It wasn't terrible, but really just wasn't good enough to spend another couple hours watching again.

Review by M. Reynard 2010

Recommended: No

Movie Mood: Scary Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: A few glitches, but mostly complete.
Worst Part of this Film: Pacing