Review of Devil (2010) by Drago? C — 11 Mar 2015

Devil has one of the coolest concepts I've been presented with. Imagine that the Devil was expelled to Earth, and never left. He takes human form and hunts down groups of evil-doers, traps them together in a confined area, then turns them against each other, forcing them to kill one another out of fear, or secretly killing them off himself, before they have a chance to make up for their sins, thusly securing their place in Hell. The Devil's been doing this forever, and with modern-day folk in a modern-day world, he is never in short supply of wicked people or tight spaces.

Unfortunately, where it fails is in the writing. The direction of John Erick Dowdle (The Poughkeepsie Tapes, Quarantine) is brilliant, there's no flaw in the acting, the premise is, as mentioned incredible, it's a perfectly creepy supernatural horror set in a suburban nightmare, but it's just not good enough. Sounds ridiculous, but when they chose not to set the entire film in the box (à la Buried) then they have no excuse not to give us some set-up with the characters who we're supposed to be keeping an eye, given that one of them's meant to be The Devil and all, when in actual fact I cared much more about the Police Detective and Head of Security (above), because their interactions seemed genuine, and were actually interesting.

It's probably unfair of me to blame the film's problems on M. Night Shyamalan, but I'm gonna do that anyway, because I don't like him. I think he's one of the most self-centred and ridiculous directors out there, which is even worse given that he hasn't released anything of value since The Sixth Sense over 10 years ago (an argument could probably be made for Signs, but personally I don't really care for it, and even taking that into account, he immediately followed that one with the release of The Village, which was an absolute insult to the Horror genre, and don't even get me started on the work he's done since then...).

I can forgive the fact this movie revolves around a spiritual entity I don't believe in roaming the Earth killing people for things as lame as "assault" or "investment fraud", I can chock that all down to freedom of exploring the supernatural, and the suspension of disbelief, but if screenwriter Brian Nelson (Hard Candy, 30 Days of Night) seriously expects us to believe that Emergency Services would take several hours to get to a building in city central when a police detective is watching them being killed off one by one, then he obviously has no respect for his audience.

The film would almost certainly appeal to enthusiasts of Agatha Christie type works, people who care about South American mythology, and (God help me if they still exist) M. Night Shyamalan fans. I found it to be better than most of his recent work, but ultimately nothing compared to the oh-so-promising premise that we we were offered.

44%.

-Gimly.