Release Date – 9/17/2010
In a Philadelphia office building, five people are trapped inside an elevator. Cops are nearby responding to a mysterious jumping suicide death from that same building so its only natural that they take the elevator call also. When the people trapped inside the elevator start mysteriously dying every time the lights go out, one security guard tells the story of the Devil coming to Earth to torture those who will be seeing him in Hell one day. Cops are in disbelief but have a hard time explaining it otherwise. So one of the people in the elevator could be the Devil himself. The movie has a decent setup to the story but poor execution and terrible acting. An improved third act couldn’t save this movie for me.
The cast is of relatively unknown actors. Trapped in the elevator are a temp Security Guard (Bokeem Woodbine), a smarmy salesman (Geoffrey Arend), an elderly woman (Jenny O’Hara), a spoiled rich girl (Bojana Novakovic) and a mysterious young guy (Logan Marshall-Green). Two security guards (Jacob Vargas & Matt Craven) call in the police (Chris Messina & Joshua Peace) to help with the situation. Everyone is in the right place at the right time for the Devil to get his message across. If you do bad things, you are punished. Each person in the elevator may not be what you perceive them to be. One of the security guards begins telling the story his mother used to tell him when he was younger. The Devil comes to Earth to punish those who are evil and there is no way to stop him. The final result is always death. He knew way too much about the situation at hand. The lead cop (Messina) of course had to be the Doubting Thomas and not believe in God due to his wife and son being killed by a drunk driver. So we have both sides of the spectrum watching this all go down.
M. Night Shyamalan has started The Night Chronicles movie series. This is only the first in the series. He thinks of an idea for a movie and then hands it off to writers and directors to complete his vision. This time the writer is Brian Nelson (30 Days of Night) and the director is John Erick Dowdle (Quarantine). The dialogue is pretty bad and the acting was reminiscent of the original Saw movies (meaning not good). It definitely took me out of the movie for a bit and caused me to laugh at scenes I wasn’t supposed to be laughing at. The movie is barely over 80 minutes long so I didn’t have time to recover and forget about parts that I hated. I do admit it got better as it progressed into the final act. The twist in the end is not even a twist. Its not something you can guess as the movie goes on, its just thrown at you as a surprise. And I even laughed at that part too. Another failure for Shyamalan but at least its not all his fault this time.
IMDB – 6.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes – 43%
Movie Wiseguys – 5/10
