Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some Thoughts on "Devil"

And not a single "going down" joke.
What a waste.

Devil (2010)

Directed by John Erick Dowdle
Produced by M. Night Shyamalan, Sam Mercer
Written by Brian Nelson, Story by M. Night Shyamalan

Starring Chris Messina, Logan Marshall-Green, Geoffrey Arend, Bojana Novakovic

Budget: $10M

Is it safe to say you've lost all credibility when your name becomes a punchline? When I saw The Hangover in theaters, this was one of the trailers and the audience laughed when Shyamalan's name came up, despite the fact that he isn't the director.

The film starts with an upside-down flyover of the Philadelphia skyline as a narrator drones on about how the Devil likes to roam the earth looking for sinners. He takes human form, messes with them for a bit to taint their souls, then kills them. It's a pretty inefficient way to harvest souls, but who am I to question how Satan does things?

This time the big D's decided he's going to collect a bunch of awful people in an elevator, then contrive a bunch of ways to kill them. We meet...well, actually, we don't really meet our characters because we don't find out their names until partway through the movie. We're introduced to Detective Bowden (Messina) who's got a tragic past, as he investigates an apparent suicide. Turns out this building contains five sinners who get trapped in an elevator, and things unwind as, one by one, they Agatha Christie themselves to an unsatisfying anti-climax. A salesman, a liar, a mechanic, a security guard, and an old woman get Punked by Satan. There's not so much a twist as a lie, and the movie ends with an attempt to teach the audience a lesson about forgiveness.

Considering Spielberg's upcoming filmography,
this might have been a little prophetic.

Now, this movie was released in 2010, around the time Shyamalan's reputation had bottomed out on the curb of popular opinion. By this point he'd directed 9 films and had securely fastened himself as the Twistmeister of Hollywood, despite the fact that really only The Sixth Sense and The Village ended in actual twists, while Lady in the Water relied on a creator cameo and The Happening was lauded as the comedy smash-hit of 2008. Since Signs his Tomato-Meter has been in a pretty steady decline, and as of the time of this writing, he's still primarily considered a punchline.

Now, Shyamalan technically didn't direct this movie, but his mark is all over. There's a series of long, uninterrupted takes as the five board the elevator, some goofy point-of-view shots from within the actual car, and some admittedly clever use of mirrors in order to include everybody in the scene.

So credit where credit is due, a lot of this criticism can be leveled at Dowdle as well, but I'm going to address this as a Shyamalan movie because, let's face it, his name was plastered all over. Part of the problem is that this movie doesn't have any truly scary moments, it's just startling. Most of the scares comes from the elevator's sudden movement, or flickering lights. Someone should let the crew know that a pitch black screen accompanied by swooshing and meat-striking sounds is not creepy, nor clever.

Still preferable to going home with Justin Long.
Also, spoilers.

There's a cast here, and they do a fine job with what they've been given. Geoffrey Arend (Snozzberries from Super Troopers) puts on a good sleazy salesman before he's killed. Logan-Marshall Green (Not Tom Hardy from Prometheus) is fine as Third-Act Protagonist. Bojana Novavkovic (appearing with Frank Grillo in the upcoming Skyline 2! Awesome! Read my review of Skyline here!) looks sufficiently scared as things go to hell (metaphorically, the movie doesn't go that far).

Anyway, the movie ends up with everybody dying except Not Tom Hardy, the Detective, and Ramirez (Jacob Vargas), and it turns out the old lady was Satan all along! Despite the fact that she died partway through. Got yah!

The Unbreakable
I've said this before, but I don't mind Shyamalan when he's got some checks on him. In this case I think it's a better film than most of his others. There are some moments of actual dread accomplished through subtle direction and minimal effort in trying to fake out your audience. A falling pane of glass is a highlight early on, and throughout we see several deaths which we could conceivably chalk up to misfortune.

What surprised me most is that Shyamalan's input was primarily focused on the story, which is usually the touch of death for his projects. The idea that the Devil's presence makes things go bad and people get hurt is a fun one to play around with. Of course, if it had been delivered with some gravitas, rather than a piece of toast, it would have been all the more effective.

The Last Airbender

I don't care.

This film was released back when Shyamalan's name was (whether rightfully or not) associated with a third-act twist. As such, most people probably went in expecting some twist or another, and for a while I did too. The most obvious one was that the entire existence of the Devil would be chalked up to humanity being the real devil, because that's how hacks do. Instead, it was less a twist and more a lie, because the Old Woman is the second person to die and it turns out she's Satan. We're left with the question of whether Satan's taken her over, whether she was always the Devil, or whether it was poor screenwriting in an attempt to feel clever.

The Hellevator
This movie was supposed to be the first in a loosely connected trilogy called The Night Chronicles which focuses on supernatural encounters within urban environments. It's a fine idea, but after this movie underperformed (somehow), the idea was put on hold. Instead, Shyamalan dialed back a bit and released The Visit which I've heard is fine. His next upcoming film is called Split and is about a serial killer / kidnapper with 24 distinct personalities. It's supposedly a spiritual successor to Unbreakable which means it's going to be really, really bad.

Verdict
There's not enough here for horror fans, and there's most certainly not enough here for fans of Shyamalan's bad work. The religious stuff isn't compelling, the scares are minor, and ultimately it's not worth the 80 minutes it takes for this elevator to hit the floor.

Bad Movie Month #19: The Last Airbender

I want to get off M. Night's Wild Ride.

The Last Airbender (2010)

Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by: M. Night Shyamalan, Sam Mercer, Frank Marshall
Written by: M. Night Shyamalan
Budget: $150,000,000

Starring: Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, Nicola Peltz, Jackson Rathbone, Shaun Toub, Aasif Mandvi, Cliff Curtis

This movie is a perfect example of how not to adapt a popular series to the big screen.

I'm a fan of the original Avatar series from Nickelodeon about a world where martial arts and elemental control are combined. It turns from a goofy kids show to a very good hero's journey series, with some great fight scenes and excellent animation.

In 2010, M. Night Shyamalan released The Last Airbender which managed to get pretty much everything wrong as an adaptation. The thing about adapting a series to the big screen is that you are trying to appeal to fans of the original while also offering something easily accessible to new viewers. Sometimes the existing mythology is so extensive that things are inevitably cut for time or simplicity's sake, but often it's enough to get the character's names right.

Not so in this movie.

The Good
This movie was shot in some beautiful locations, with sweeping hills and lots of green forests. The establishing shots are generally very pretty. In addition, some of the costume and set design isn't bad, with lots of eastern-style robes and ornate clothing.

The Airbender tattoos are ornate patterns, which I actually really liked over the blocky blue stripes from the cartoon. That was the best decision in this movie.

If you are a fan of the cartoon and want to see the worst possible adaptation that could have been made, this is the movie for you. It is fascinating to watch this movie knowing that Shyamalan has actually seen the series.

The Bad
Where to begin. It's actually really hard to condense everything that is wrong about this movie into a reasonable post.

As an adaptation this may succeed on the most basic level, but fails pretty much every other criteria imaginable. The character's names are pronounced incorrectly, the choices for the cast is baffling, and the imaginative world the television show created has been reduced to a generic fantasy world. Various characters have been congealed into easily recognizable, yet poorly executed archetypes, and certain scenes carry on in such a way that it actively prevents certain important plots from taking place in potential later films.

The acting in this is hilarious. Ringer, hired because he was already skilled in martial arts, puts forth an Aang (pronounced Ong) with some sort of halting speech impediment, hop-jump attention span, and doofy grin that doesn't convey anything except "I'm acting!" Peltz plays Katara displays some sort of talent by portraying her as both wide-eyed and dazed at the same time, and Rathbone delivers the best deadpan "I'm better than this" I've seen in a long time. Patel plays Zuko as a shouting pouter, and Mandvi camps up his General Zhao so much that I was waiting for the Daily Show reference that always seemed thirty seconds away. The best performance is by Toub as Iroh, but instead of being a paternal uncle he feels like a coddling nanny to baby Zuko.

When the actors aren't reading their lines off the script, they're standing limp in the background. Shyamalan tries to direct this with a lot of long shots which feel like they should work, but the problems immediately become apparent when you actually look at the choreography and what everyone is doing in the background. In the scene of the prisoner revolt the action only happens to a group of three or so actors at once...everyone else is standing completely still in the background, or flailing their weapons around like video game characters in an idle animation.

Speaking of choreography, you would think the martial arts would at least be cool to watch right? Well, it is if you like to watch people flail around for far too long to produce cheap-looking special effects. For a series which absolutely requires a large special effects budget, this movie looks downright cheap at certain points in regards to the elemental control. One of the first shots of the movie focuses on a globe of animated water which would look out of place in a movie from 1999. When the movie lets you catch a glimpse of one of the computer animated animals it's blurry and looks superimposed over the actors. The "spirit world" is a number of film filters imposed on a shot.

This would all be acceptable if the script was at least halfway competent, but Shyamalan didn't seem to understand how people in the real world speak. Conversations are disjointed sentences belched between characters at random intervals and certain writing choices are simply bizarre. For example, we don't learn our main character's name until nearly 20 minutes into the movie. A group of people who can control rock are kept prisoner on blankets in the middle of a canyon. The commander of the Water Tribe says they need to extinguish all fires ASAP, but in the middle of the siege you can clearly see all of the lights are still lit.

It's tough to articulate how little anyone involved in this seemed to care. Shyamalan said in an interview his kids loved the series and he'd seen the entire thing. All three seasons were completed by the time this movie entered production, so he had access to every story decision he could possibly need to keep, and yet this movie feels like an Asylum mockbuster of an actual adaptation we never received.

The Rest
In September of 2015 Shyamalan said he will make a sequel after his next thriller release. I for one am looking forward to his interpretation of Toph Beifong and the rest of the second season.

Should You Watch it?
If you haven't seen the TV series, no.

If you have seen the TV series, I would give it a shot as long as you can gather a group of friends who have also watched it, because despite everything I said above this movie is one beautiful disaster of an adaptation.

Bad Movie Month #09: The Happening

HEY GUYS BE NICE TO THE PLANET

The Happening (2008)

Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by: M. Night Shyamalan, Barry Mendel, Sam Mercer
Written by: M. Night Shyamalan
Budget: $48,000,000

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley

Elliot Moore (Wahlberg) is an unconvincing, wide-eyed high school science teacher with an equally wide-eyed, unconvincing wife Alma (Deschanel). When a mysterious neurotoxin starts making people kill themselves in droves, the pair takes on their friend Julian's (Leguizamo) daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) as they try to survive this strange...happening.

It's plants, which isn't much of a spoiler.

"The Happening" is not one of Shyamalan's better-remembered films, which isn't saying something considering his track record resembles a black diamond ski slope in quality. Shyamalan has always been open about how much Alfred Hitchcock influenced his own film making, and there's a lot of Hitchcock in this movie, but ultimately not enough to overcome the now-expected underwhelming Shyamalan slump.

Now, I don't outright hate Shyamalan like a lot of people seem to. He's a fine director, and "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" are really good. "Signs" was alright, and even "The Village" has its fans, for some reason. The problem comes when he's in control of most of a movie's production, similar to George Lucas on the prequels, and...man, "The Happening" was bad.

Please note that every time I use the word "happening" I am not trying to make a pun. It's just a side-effect of the cruddy title.

The Good
The movie actually starts out on a good note. Before we're even introduced to our main characters we have several scenes of nobodies killing themselves in various ways. One woman pierces her throat with a hair needle, a bunch of construction workers jump to their death, and a group of people pass around a cop's gun. These scenes are lies, because the minute they stop the movie slides more and more into ridiculous territory.

The construction worker scene at the start of the movie is by far the best scene in the movie. Cornell Womack actually puts in a good performance as a construction man who thinks his buddy's just fallen from the top of a site. Unfortunately he's not the main character.

The Bad
As you might have noticed above, I can't even really talk about this movie's good parts without bringing up how bad the rest of the movie is in comparison. While the early scenes are really well done the entire thing drops after the 23 minute mark, when we start getting information about what's actually happening. You can actually sense the cast giving up when we see the video of the tigers tearing a man's arms off.

The acting is hilariously bad almost entirely across the board. I don't mind Wahlberg when he's playing a meathead, but his performance as science teacher Elliot is so strikingly awful that I almost felt bad for him. In interviews he's mentioned that Shyamalan wanted Wahlberg to play someone different than his typical muscle-bro but he doesn't seem up to the task. His attempts to sound urgent are hard to describe, but it sounds like he's reading all of his lines sarcastically, which I don't think was intentional.

And then there's Dechanel. I feel like a large part of her performance can be chalked up to the fact that Alma has almost zero character development past teary-eyed worry, because she's not normally a bad actress. She was fine in...um...New Girl? She was in Elf, and she did alright in that. There were lines where I would just stare slack-jawed at her delivery, at the dialogue, at the framing. For reference, there is a character in the movie for about ten minutes total who gains more character from a speech about hotdogs than Alma does throughout the entire film.

Shyamalan obviously thinks he's the next Hitchcock, and that wasn't helped by times when people called him the next Spielberg. There's some major similarities between The Happening and Birdemic, and not just in the way that the stories are parallel environmental anvils. Both directors were massively influenced by Hitchcock and other directors of that time, but I feel like Shyamalan was good enough early on that it's gone to his head. It's only recently that his name's stopped being a punchline and people are giving him a lesser Affleck treatment.

Finally, there are scenes in the movie that are so absurd it makes me wonder whether Shyamalan didn't actually intend for this to be a comedy of some sort. Some noteworthy scenes include Mark Wahlberg talking to a plant, a group of people running away from the wind, and the bizarre framing, shots, and pans. There are multiple dialogue exchanges where each line has its own close-up shot without allowing the actor's full face in the shot. The effect is somewhat like shooting a movie through a wide-angle lens without any considering for what that would actually make the movie look like.

The Rest
Here's a drinking game I came up with:

One drink every time:
-Someone says "Event"
-Someone says "happening"
-Someone says "terrorist"

-Drink for the duration of any shot consisting solely of plant life

-Finish your drink any time someone talks to a plant.

Hard Mode: Drink every time Deschanel underacts.

Here is a link to Mark Wahlberg's best performance. Whaaaaat? Nooooooo.

Should You Watch it?
"The Happening" is a study in bad film-making. If you go into it looking for some comedic entertainment or as a look at how a once-adored director can fall so far, it's passable. If you go in expecting a legitimate thriller, turn it off once the train stops. As a drama this movie ends far better if you imagine everyone kills themselves rather than letting love conquer the plants.

If that sounds harsh, I did my job.