Devil (2010)

I'm very very tired after four days of walking through other places than my usual residence so I'm not in the very best shape for writing. Fortunately "Devil" is not a movie that takes to much time, at least not with the subject, because if I would say too much I would also spoil too much from what you get to see.

IMDb designates it as Horror, Mistery, Thriller (the usual alphabetic order). I consider that the movie is pretty far from the classic horror definition that you might have in mind, and it's oriented more towards the last two above. Remember "Fallen" with Denzel Washington ? It's probably one of the best movies I've ever seen which is somehow centered on the same theme = devil, demon, etc presence among humans. What we have here is pretty far in terms of quality I might say, but as "horror" level is in the same area. Which is one a bit more particular = I don't think it's scary (the trailer is deceiving) and it also doesn't have tons of disemboweled guts, eyes removed or other possible "dishes" from the classic "Saw" menu (what can I do, I'm giving the same example as usual, it's a reference after how many parts they released). The "horror" itself is just related to the evil presence in the title which here appears in a pretty original context. The idea is the next: one day .. a Philadelphia police investigator gets a new case just after breakfast = a corpse suddenly appeared on the top of a truck. After a short lookup it's determined that the body belongs to a suicidal who jumped from a floor on a high nearby building. In which building ... coincidence (or not .. obviously :) ), 5 persons are trapped into an elevator while going up. Elevator where ...

... the movie will show what happens ;) . I'll just stop at repeating the same boring everyday phrase without saying anything else :). I'm pretty sure that for the most the poster will not raise the interest for the movie and do exactly the opposite. Obviously the reason is the tagline "From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan". Ok, don't run now :) if you didn't noticed it before ... This guy actually succeded in getting out an excellent movie : "The 6th Sense" after which he pretty much messed up everything in which he was involved. Only "Unbreakable" was a bit above average, and "The Village" had some potential but didn't went forward than this. Besides those, worse and worse ... And I'm starting to believer that the main problem was the direction, or the changes the director does on his own script when he's working on the set. It seems that for the mentioned one, this position is not really recommended, because here we actually see the result when he sticks only to the story writing. And the result is definitely better. In most of his productions up to this point (I won't stay to count which one yes and which one not), he really tried to have a surprise factor in the ending, but he didn't make it to get something on par with the first one. It's also neither here, but u have some unexpected factor and the ending at least is not a catastrophe. Even if it might seem that's cut a bit short (and maybe also predictable if you're not very tired), the movie is far from being the mess "Signs" was at the ending. And, repeating myself, I believe that's quite a lot related also to the fact that the directing was left this time for somebody else.

Even if it seems to be distributed by Universal, I don't think that the movie had any big budget, and this actually makes it look a bit cheap on some parts. Even so, the cinematography, the editing and the sound are relatively ok. I especially liked the upside down travelings you get to see also in the trailer. But there is one thing that I liked even more, and that's the casting (maybe it's caused by the experience I had last week, I don't know ...). We don't have any box-office generator in the cast = some ultra known name, but the roles made are sufficiently well done and credible, and the most interesting part is that we have pretty different characters, and you get to see each personality transposed on screen. Ok, I won't get any longer with the entry (because I'm already yawning :) ) and even if down below I have a conclusion which might look partly similar with the last week one, I can say that the general impression was much better.

Rating: 3 out of 5 (more towards 4 .. I think I should start giving with a ratio ...)