Victim of its own hype

Rating: 3/10 (4 August 2006)

We heard it would be the second-coming of horror cinema. Inevitably, The Descent suffers from comparison to the massive internet buzz which greeted its arrival here in the U.S.
The Descent is really two parallel stories, the literal descent of the heroines into an unexplored cave system, and their figurative descent into madness and brutality. It's a metaphoric ploy which could work in the hands of someone with more experience, but in the oafish claws of Neill Marshall, all that is on display here is slickly produced gore, to no real end. There's promise, in some early scenes, of real tension which is never fulfilled, and the much-touted psychological characterizations of the five cave explorers is lost in a lot of shrieking during the second-half of the movie.
The movie has its moments, but they're not where you'd expect, and not, sadly, where Marshall spends any time as a director. The natural paranoia and claustrophobia of the early cave exploration, as these people are shoved into tighter and tighter confines (and tighter and more uncomfortable psychological space) should be riveting...instead, we get a few cringe-worthy scenes of shifting rocks and then...more running about and screaming.
By the (highly anticlimactic) end, you're simply not sure why you bothered. There's a certain grim fun in guessing which of the heroines will meet their doom next, but by then you care so little about any of them that it's too easy to dismiss this as yet another substitution of fake blood for story, or scares.
Grade: C-.