DOWN

In a skyscraper located in a luxurious structure, the Millennium Building, in New York, strange things happen: mysterious accidents and chain deaths follow one after another. An unsettling common denominator of these inexplicable and tragic events is the building's elevator. A maintenance worker and a nosy journalist will attempt to unravel the dense mystery, risking their lives more than once... Marketed as the sequel to "The Elevator" and directed by the same director, Dick Maas, author, among others, of the excellent "Amsterdamned", in reality this "Down" is nothing more than a remake made with a higher budget, but with an amateurism and a lack of ideas that are astonishing. Among the protagonists of the "misfact" it is worth mentioning the presence, in the role of the courageous journalist, of Naomi Watts, already admired in "The Ring" and in "Mulholland Drive", here however really below her two previous performances. To enrich a plot that is full of holes and which turns out to be quite improbable, even the highest military authorities and the Uncle Sam plots are brought into play! As if that were not enough, the director, perhaps under the influence of a bout of narcissism, cites himself in an unbelievable way to the point of becoming even irritating. Situations already seen in the first film, which by the way was overall decent and fascinating in its basic idea, are taken up without a hint of originality but with a tone that is almost "self-celebratory" completely out of place. Despite the decent availability of means, the film is only watchable. Banalities and clichés of the genre merge inexorably, demeaning the viewer. The only scene worth mentioning, but really too little to change the judgment, is the sequence in which the elevator commits a terrible massacre against some of its occupants, even projecting them in pieces out of the skyscraper. Horror, as a genre, seems to be in a crisis of ideas and certain amateurish films do not leave much hope for something good in the near future.