Not scary, not gory and, worst of all, not well acted or written.

Rating: 1/10 (24 May 2006)

Neil Marshall's feature debut as writer and director, the generally excellent Dog Soldiers, was burdened with one flaw. In a movie about men, with some fantastic 'bloke' dialogue, Marshall proved himself to have a tin ear for female dialogue. The talented Emma Cleasby was burdened down with some awful lines that sounded like rejects from Rachel Weitz' part in The Mummy. They might have worked in that campy environment - in the grimmer Dog Soldiers, they were just clumsy.
The Descent is that, multiplied by six female leads, none of them as talented as Cleasby.
Marshall's sophomore outing is just that - juvenile, priapic and gormless. Sticking half a dozen women down a cave (try to work out which country it's set in and what nationality the disposable 'heroines' are supposed to come from - I dare you) he leaves them to get consumed by albino cave dwellers. Dependent upon lapses in narrative logic that will annoy the halfway competent film watcher and indulging in failures in basic caving protocol that make it completely implausible that the cast could find their way out of a land rover, it's more Elle than Fangoria. Everything is set up for these smug Prada-by-way-of-DMM yuppettes to get slaughtered, and then they descend into asinine bickering. You'll be praying for their deaths... and possibly your own, if it brings this fearsome drivel in to land quicker.
It is ironic that several noted movie gossip sites that constantly criticize M. Night Shyamalan for the use of twist endings are lauding The Descent, when it has possibly the worst and clumsiest 'shock' reveal of the last decade. This is a new low in cinema because it shows that the once-critical audiences have now accepted pablum as worthwhile. Once upon a time, the benchmark trapped-in-the-wilderness movies were films like 2,000 Maniacs, The Hills Have Eyes, Cannibal Ferox and Deliverance. If this is getting good word, we need to reconsider the medium.