DEVIL

There are a great many examples of “no” in DEVIL, the latest effort from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan, this one released without benefit of a press screening. No suspense. No scares. No originality. No fun. No reason to bestir oneself to see it.

Told in the form of a fable, perhaps to account for the single-minded simple-mindedness of the script by Brian Nelson from a story by Shyamalan, it purports to be an illustration of a devil’s meeting. Several damned souls are gathered together in one place, in this case an elevator of doom, and taunted and toyed with as the devil picks them off one by one and takes them to Hell. Perhaps the damned souls on screen suffer, but not as much as the audience, which spends its time wondering when things will start to get interesting. Like those waiting for Godot, it’s a fruitless wait. The direction plods when it moves at all. The characters are singularly uninteresting, making the slow reveal of their sordid pasts less revelatory than another benchmark in the plot that signals progress towards the sweet relief of the final credits.

The chic woman (Bojana Novakovic), the smarmy salesman (Geoffrey Arend), the suspiciously introverted guy in the hoodie (Logan Marshall-Greene), the security guard with claustrophobia (Bokeem Woodbine), the crochety old lady (Jenny O’Hara) who gets on everyone’s nerves, and, of course, the express elevator that preys on its passenger while stopped a dozen floors from the closest egress. Throw in a security guard (Jacob Vargas) on the outside who conveniently knows the legend of the devil’s meet and can recount it to the police detective (Chris Messina) with the tragic past called into supervise the situation. The security guard is also the only one who notices and then takes seriously the malevolent face that mysteriously appears and disappears from the elevator’s video feed. Top it off with a dark and stormy day in Philadelphia with lowering clouds, booming thunder, and lightning blazing with wild abandon. The trapped passengers spar when the lights are on, scream when the lights flicker out, and none of them has a pen when they need it to communicate with building security when the outgoing sound transmission fails. It’s a cliché fest par excellence, and a sloppy one at that.

The actors, bless them, take it all very seriously, which, alas, works to the film’s disadvantage. Though taking an ironic approach would have been difficult what with there being no humor to be found here. The wacky building engineer bravely fighting raccoons and pigeons to get to the trapped passengers is just so much filler before illustrating the point, noted in voiceover, that even the innocent can be hurt when trying to intervene in the devil’s plans.

The supposed twist is anything but, having been telegraphed almost from the first frame and reinforced about halfway through. For a flick that purports to depict infernal justice, it shows an astonishing lack of creepiness or the macabre. DEVIL has all the thrills and excitement of the forensic accounting report that, unaccountably, figures into the plot that induces yawns, not chills.