Review ‘The Pyramid’ From The Editor

Capping off what can only be described as one of the worst years for mainstream horror in the last decade, 20th Century Fox has delivered a fun, yet familiar thrill ride with The Pyramid.

It’s August 2013 and the streets of Cairo are on the brink of complete chaos. The government and its citizens are fighting for reasons far too meaningful for a film like The Pyramid to try and explain, but it does, however, provide a great setting to begin a film that otherwise would need a solid twenty or thirty minutes before providing anything that could come close to being described as a scare.

We’re introduced to a documentary team who, after learning about a pyramid being uncovered in Egypt, disregard numerous warnings to stay away from the war torn nation and journey inland with hopes of being the first to cover the mysterious discovery. What they find is more than they or the team responsible for the dig could have ever expected, and it will take everything they have to ensure they make it home alive.

Usually, one must wait until January to see a movie as forgettable and indifferent as “The Pyramid,” but Fox has apparently decided to get the jump on the post-holiday slump, ditching this by-the-numbers horror exercise into fewer than 600 theaters while audiences are distracted by Christmas shopping and Katniss Everdeen’s bow and arrow.

The Pyramid is riddled with genre tropes and jump scares you can easily find in countless other films, but the way they’re woven together throughout the genuinely intriguing plot is something wholly unique to the minds of writers Daniel Meersand and Nick Simon.

You can probably guess that the characters eventually decide to enter the pyramid, though in their defense they do their best to avoid ever needing to, and I would hope you could also infer from the fact this is a horror film that before long they discover it’s a lot harder to get out of an ancient structure than it is to get in.

What you’re incapable of knowing is the true reason why they have become trapped, or what exactly the purpose of the structure they’ve discovered was when it was fully operational. Everyone assumes every pyramid is the same because we’ve never found one that was all that different. This one is different. This one is very different.

Apart from about three or four decent scares, director Grégory Levasseur (the first-time filmmaker wrote “High Tension” and the remakes of “The Hills Have Eyes” and “Maniac” for “Pyramid” producer Alexandre Aja) mostly spins his wheels when he’s not outright stealing shots from “Alien,” various Indiana Jones movies, and other superior thrillers.

Surprise, surprise, they discover that the pyramid has been designed to entrap an evil force, and these bumblers have released it, and then “Aah!” and crash and fall and they start getting picked off one by one, “And Then There Were None”-style. Premise-wise, this scenario (from screenwriters Daniel Meersand and Nick Simon) could produce some excitement, but apart from the occasional thrill, Levasseur fails to build tension or make us care about who lives or who dies.

The characters are so thinly devised that not even the talented O’Hare can draw much out of what he’s given. Nicola finds the humor in her character’s ability to pivot into chirpy-TV-presenter mode at a moment’s notice, but that’s about the only spark of humanity to be found here. (Even this actress can’t make the line, “Stop being an archaeologist for a minute, and start being a human being!” into anything that won’t prompt giggles from bored viewers.)

Hinshaw, through no fault of her own, gets stuck with a character so flimsy she might as well be called Hot Pants Egyptologist, as though she’d learned all the wrong things from Lara Croft. You’d think, of this crew, she’d be fairly familiar with catacombs and tunnels, but she spends much of the film being led around by the male characters, even Fitzie.

The ultimate moral of “The Pyramid,” and of almost every other film where an underground mummy or scarab or tomb wreaks havoc, is that some things were never meant to be uncovered. Some movies, too.