Yes, I watched this thinking it would be a horror movie set in an insane asylum. It's not. When their boss goes missing, two body guards for a mofia boss-type try to find out what what happened to him while his son sets about taking control of his father's empire...the empire he might have killed his father for.
Not bad right? Certainly better than most of junk out there. And for the most part the story does a decent job. It's that twisted path trying to find the truth while everyone is manipulating them for their own ends. Unfortunately the ending, and that twist, is a pretty obvious one and it causes the movie to end on a very blah note.
** SPOILERS *** So is it a surprise in a movie about finding the truth while everyone is lying that the story is really being told by the protagonist and that he has been lying all along (essentially lying to us)? Well, no. So how do movies like THE USUAL SUSPECTS get away with it?
Well, they do it by with a bait and switch. You see there are actually two stories going on in U-S and they fool us by getting us to pay attention to one story while we forget about the other. The question they trick us on is Who is Keyser Sosey? (or however you spell it) But that's not the main story that we are watching for the movie. The main story is about these four bad a** crooks -- so bad that they will even steal fromt he cops if the cops mess with them -- who get roped into a job by a mysterious underworld figure. This job is do or die, but if they get away with it they can earn $10 MILLION. The main story (told in flashbacks) is about these guys meeting with Keyser's representative, trying to get the upperhand on him, having turn the tables on them and so forcing them to do this potentially rich suicide mission. We get so caught up in that story that we stop asking ourselves the initial question -- Who is Keysor Sosay? (or however you spell it). So when they come back to it at the end, they can pull this switch and get away with it. It becomes this cool moment that makes you re-evaluate everything you saw before in this cool way. It makes you realize the movie was about more than you thought. That's what gives it the WOW moment when, after tricking the cops and the crooks, he walks off a disappears. (The best trick the devil ever did was making people believe he didn't exist.)
Unfortunately THE LEVEL (aka ASYLUM) doesn't have anything else. It just has the one straight story -- what happened to the boss and people telling lie after lie -- so when the end comes...well, it's just the reveal of one more lie. So what? You don't re-evaluate things because there wasn't that other level to the story. They could just as easily have said it was all a dream.
It's shame, because there's a lot of good things in the movie. So watch it, but you don't need to watch it all the way to the end.
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