Most of the way through Down, I checked to see if this was Naomi Watts first movie. It's not. So she had no excuse.
Down was a remake of Dick Maas's Dutch horror thriller The Shaft, redone by him for American release I guess. They got American stars and made it in English and set the film in NY and bam, Down is ready for us Americans.
Down is the sort of movie that probably didn't translate much to the cultural differences. I mean, I have no idea what the original movie was like, nor do I know if this remake was popular over there in the Netherlands where it was filmed. All I'm really guessing is something didn't work, cuz this movie didn't.
It's first of all the dubbing. I don't know why it's dubbed but it is, and the voices are very comical. Then it's the trite characters and silk thin ideas. This movie is on the ever present graph chart that is "so bad it's good' but at the time it came out I can see it just being bad.
The Millennium Tower is a 100-something story building in NY, with 70 elevators. It's stuck by a lot of lightning one night and from that point on the elevators come alive. Not all of them, confusingly, and not all the time. But they do. And they start to kill people. The elevator tech gets called in and now it's up to him and plucky reporter Naomi Watts to figure out what's going wrong.
There was a line in this movie, Naomi Watts says at one point "Manhattan used to be Native American land, maybe the building is on a Indian burial ground?!" I was thinking, the moment I actually get paid money to say something that stupid and cliche in a film, I'd fucking celebrate. Isn't this every actors dream?
The movie is pretty ridiculous and I'm not sure if it was trying to be or not. I feel like it wasn't, but that still makes it fun. I'll give it 2.5
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