The Devil You Know

I saw The Other Guys this weekend.  Not much to talk about there. It was pretty much what I expected; a slightly less clever Hot Fuzz with more one liners. Samuel L Jackson and The Rock's characters, while they were short on screen time they were perfect and worth the price of admission. 

 

I did want to mention that I saw probably the most suspenseful/scary movie trailer i've seen in a long time.  It starts out very "Inception-esque" with panning shots of New York City, upside down with some lines about random meetings or something. I'm guessing the upside down shots of city-scapes is something we're going to be seeing a lot of for a while now.  It did it's job of making me off balance.  

  

The movie looks to be about 5 people (2 guys, security guard, a young woman and an old lady) that get trapped in the elevator of a high rise.  There's some shots of them trying to get out, while help on the outside is trying to get in.  No one can figure out why its stuck. People are just starting to panic when the lights in the elevator go out for a second.  The young woman on the elevator screams and when the lights come back on we find out that someone has stabbed her.  She's not dead but bleeding and freaked out. And everyone in the elevator starts turning on each other as they try to figure out who did this.  Which of them is a psycho. 

 

By this point the trailer is doing a great job keeping everyone in the audience enthralled. People that were talking during the other trailers have shut up. Cell phones are closed. Whoever put the trailer together did a great job, i felt, at getting the audience to experience the panic that you would undergo if you were in that situation. That one of the four people that are currently no less than 3 feet from you, may attack you the next time the lights go out and you have no where to go or hide. 

 

And then M Night Shyamalan's name comes up on the screen and literally everyone in the theater started laughing.

 

Whatever hard work, be it science or art, that the trailer team used to put that thing together was lost at that point. Everyone was laughing and talking again.  We're all looking at each other like we just got punkd or something. I can't even tell you what the rest of the trailer was.  More flashes of light and people screaming.  I think one of the people is supposed to be the devil.  But I didn't realize that until I got home, looked up the trailer and saw thats what the movie is called; Devil. I'm sure everyone in the elevator is the devil.  or none of them are. Or we're the devil.  Maybe the elevator is really the devil. 

 

Whatever though, fuck this movie.