BEFORE: OK, so I've covered witches, ghosts, zombies, creepers, serial killers, aliens, things that live in swamps, things that live under houses and things that live under stairs. Also one serial killer, evil doctors, evil gynecologists and one Cocaine Bear. What's left at this point? How about the Big Bad, the Devil himself? Itself?
Bokeem Woodbine carries over again for his fourth (and final) film in this chain. Just five films left in October after this one, and 25 films left in the year.
THE PLOT: A group of people are trapped in an elevator and the Devil is mysteriously among them.
AFTER: Well, this is an interesting turn of events, it's kind of like a locked-room murder mystery, only the locked room is a stuck elevator, and also there's no mystery about who did it. So then maybe it's not at all like a locked-room murder mystery.
I once worked on a shoot for a short film that was set in an elevator - I was only a production assistant, but I was tasked with finding a fake elevator car, renting a truck, picking up the fake elevator, delivering it to the set, and then showing the directors how it worked. Maybe that was the shoot where I sort of stopped being a P.A. and started acting like a production manager or producer, I'm not sure. But I felt sort of important at the time, because if I hadn't done all those things, then the shoot would not have been possible, likely it would have been scrapped.
It turns out that many of the elevators you see in movies and TV shows aren't real, except maybe in documentaries. So that means that somebody out there is an expert at building fake elevators that LOOK real, and also have doors that need to be pushed closed by hand, they're not automatic. Also they probably have panels that can be removed on any side so that the camera can shoot into the elevator from any angle - otherwise the camera would have to be squeezed into the elevator with the actors, and you probably wouldn't get the framing that the director wanted, everything would be like a close-up, maybe too close. I tend to notice this about elevators on film, maybe because I worked on that shoot years ago.
(I notice mirrors in films, too, often they're fake, because any mirror shot might likely show the camera and/or cameraperson in them, at least when the camera angle is straight-on. I first noticed this during the closing shot in "Peggy Sue Got Married" where Nic Cage and Helen Hunt were reflected in a mirror at the hospital, but the camera was not seen - and I determined the only way to shoot that was to have a rectangular hole in the wall where the mirror was, and on the other side of that hole another whole room in reverse, with look-alike actors trying to match the stars' actions. Turns out I was 100% right, and if you watch that scene you'll see that the look-alikes' actions don't match up exactly right. There's a shot like that in the opening of "Devil", with a mirror in the elevator reflecting the actions of the people getting into the elevator, but not the camera. I'm betting they used the same technique, a hole in the wall with look-alike actors on the other side.)
Anyway, I've gotten completely off track - let's get back to the Devil, the main man in Hell, the driving force behind everything evil in the world, if you believe in that sort of thing. But just as the good thing about ghosts is that their existence proves an afterlife, the good thing about the Devil is that if he's real, then so is God. Right? There's balance in nature, but still, the easiest answer to the question of religion is that NEITHER God nor the Devil are real. But OK, let's assume for the sake of Halloween and this film that there is a Devil, Satan, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles or whatever you call him. Do you think that he's going to have horns and a tail and be colored red all over, like in the comic books and fairy tales? Man, you'd see him coming like a mile away, and then you'd fall back on your religious training and either avoid him, or at least you wouldn't sign anything he asked you to sign. Right?
So yeah, the Devil probably tried that stuff with the horns and the forked tail for a while, but don't you figure humans would catch on? So the Devil's not going to LOOK like the devil, he's going to look like a beautiful woman or a Boy Scout or your great-grandmother, just to get you into a conversation where he can then tempt you with something, offer you your greatest desire FOR A PRICE of course. Or maybe he sells you a cell phone plan that you can't resist because of the impossibly low price, and there in the fine print of that contract, you sign away your soul. Yeah, that's probably how he works these days.
This film figures a different kind of deal, something that the Latino character who works security in the building recognizes and calls "The Devil's Meeting", which is triggered by a suicide. The suicide works as a sacrifice that triggers the meeting, in which the Devil finds him (or her) self in close proximity to a few humans, who end up killing each other because he's played upon their basest human emotions like aggression or prejudice. But perhaps he's really just after ONE soul in particular, and this is how he gets it, through testing him - or does he get the soul of everybody in the meeting? This part is a bit unclear - also unclear is whether this "Devil's Meeting" folklore already existed or was created just for this movie. Because it sure seems to me like the Devil's Meeting aligns so perfectly with five people stuck in an elevator, a situation where all involved are tense and nervous and ready to resort to barbaric behavior after, say, an hour stuck between floors.
But which one of these five people might be the Devil? Good luck trying to guess - because it might just be the one you'd least suspect. But then, you'd expect them to do something like that, right? So maybe therefore the one you'd suspect first then BECOMES the one you'd least suspect. There's a building security guard, a mechanic, a mattress salesman, a young woman and an older woman - place your bets... Then there's also a detective who started out investigating the suicide that started the whole thing, who then turns his attention to the people in the stuck elevator who want to all kill each other for some reason. Well, if you had to listen to elevator music for hours, you'd probably feel homicidal as well, if not suicidal.
The detective also has a past, a tragic event in which he lost his wife and son, and who knows, that may become important later on in the film. But there seems to be some kind of logical error in the Devil's reasoning - like it almost seems like he engineered this whole thing to get the soul of someone in particular, and he maybe needn't have bothered, because if things work the way we've been told, wouldn't he eventually get that person's soul, anyway? Why go through so much fuss to get it, then, instead of just letting it come to him? This story was written by M. Night Shyamalan, and I think he's known for sometimes emphasizing exciting story twists over logical story progressions.
By the way, that short film I worked on (back in 1990 or 1991) was kind of similar to "Devil", in that it also featured four people - two married couples cheating on each other, though - on an elevator with a person who turns out to be the devil. But there the elevator was a metaphor for life, how we're all traveling up, up to eternity and some people are already on the elevator when we step on, and others leave before we get to our floor, or something like that. Make what you will of that - but in that film, the tuba player turned out to be the devil. For today's film, no spoilers, you're on your own.
Also starring Chris Messina (last seen in "Air"), Logan Marshall-Green (last seen in "How It Ends"), Jenny O'Hara (last seen in "Duck Butter"), Bojana Novakovic (last seen in "Birds of Prey"), Geoffrey Arend (last seen in "Save the Date"), Jacob Vargas (last seen in "Bobby"), Matt Craven (last seen in "Disturbia"), Josh Peace (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Caroline Dhavernas (last seen in "Breach"), Joe Cobden (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holiday"), Zoie Palmer, Vincent Laresca (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Rudy Webb, Craig Eldridge (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Joe Pingue (ditto), Genadijs Dolganovs, Killian Grahy, Michael Rhoades (last seen in "Against the Ropes"), Kelly Jones, Jonathan Potts (last seen in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"), Alice Poon, Shannon Garnett, Kimberlyh Ables Jindra, Gage Munroe (last seen in "Nobody").
RATING: 4 out of 10 shards of glass
No comments:
Post a Comment