Devil

Just when you thought that being stuck with a flatulent cabbage lover was the worst that could happen to you in an elevator.
M. Night Shyamalan (or my preferred M. Night Shakalakalaka Boom)(that's right, Walk The Dinosaur, bitches!) has come up with three ideas for three films and given them to someone else to write and direct and called them The Night Chronicles. How bloody lazy is he?
Devil is part one.
Is this so he can give others an inside look into the way his twisty mind works or so he doesn't get blamed for anymore box office flops?
As always, time will tell.
30 Days Of Night scribe Brian Nelson has taken M Night's ideas and popped them on paper while Quarantine director John Erick Dowdle popped them on to the big screen. Go team.
The premise is interesting enough; you've got five people stuck in an elevator - one of them is the Devil. Simple. All you have to do is guess which one.
Philadelphia Detectives Bowden (Chris Messina - Greenberg) and Moustashowitz, Markowitz really (Joshua Peace - Survival Of The Dead), are called to a possible suicide - a jumper. After some nifty detective work they work out that the jumper jumped from a skyscraper at (cue religious/horror tropes) 333 Locust St.
Boo.
Meanwhile inside the building, five strangers are in an elevator on their merry way up, until the elevator gets stuck. It ain't going anywhere.
Allow me to introduce to you: the claustrophobic security guard (Bokeem Woodbine); super happy mattress salesman (Geoffrey Arend - 500 Days Of Summer); annoying old lady (Jenny O'Hara - Big Love); obligatory hot chick (Bojana Novakovic - Edge Of Darkness) and intense quite guy (Logan Marshall-Green - Across The Universe).
Monitoring the situation are the rational security guard Lustig (Matt Craven - Public Enemies) and the religious security guard Ramirez (Jacob Vargas - Death Race).
Things start getting funny when lights constantly flicker in the elevator and Ramirez sees a scary face on the CCTV feed. Fumbling his St. Somebody necklace and dropping his jam sandwich on the floor in some kind of scientific experiment that undoubtedly proves the Devil's existence Ramirez starts to tell Detective Bowden about the Devil and his usual M.O.
If you think that is strange then wait... no one in the elevator has a pen.
No one.
A pattern forms, when the lights flicker then go out, someone dies. We don't see the murder, we are only given bangs and screams in the pitch black. One by one these people are being bumped off. Will the Detectives have enough time to work out who the frak is THE DEVIL???
The last M. Night film I watched was The Happening (in my head: The Day The Trees Went Whoosh). I haven't seen The Lady in The Swimming Pool or The Last Air Blender and rightly so, what has he done for me lately?? So I am totally justified in being weary about anything he ever does ever again. In saying that, this film kinda worked for me, some parts anyway.
It wasn't too long; I was constantly asking myself 'who the hell is it?'. I did make one guess in the beginning, changed my mind part way through, only to find out I was right in the first place. There was enough action on screen to keep me occupied, and there weren't any dreaded lulls.
I'm undecided about the ending and the reason behind the whole thing... it could be hokey, it could be half clever. I'll leave it stew a few days.
The things that didn't work: the voice over bugged me and got in the way, surely there was a way for Ramirez to say all of that in a conversation rather than have him narrate it; the slo-mo shot near the very end was a bit overdone; some of the dialogue was a bit naff and at one stage I wanted everyone in that elevator to die they annoyed me so much! Maybe I'm the Devil? Possibly, although you'd think I'd have more followers...
Things I learnt: elevator music will be the death of us all; always carry a pen; learn sign language.
Entertaining.
Seven out of ten.

p.s 666 is not the number of the beast - do your research.