I don’t know where to start with this one. I’ve been a M. Night Shya­malan fan from the very begin­ning, even when the role was bet­ter described as apol­o­gist. Even to a fan, nearly every film comes with a “yeah, but…” dis­claimer: The Sixth Sense is an excel­lent piece of slight-of-hand with some gen­uine emo­tion, but let down by an extended mon­tage at the end recap­ping events recon­tex­tu­al­ized by the already-clear Big Plot Reveal. Unbreak­able, my per­sonal favorite, is a remark­ably mature char­ac­ter piece on a real-world Super­man, but whose comic-book ori­gins prob­a­bly alien­ated a main­stream audi­ence that wants its comic book movies clearly sign­posted by gar­ish cos­tumes and action set pieces. Signs is a per­fectly crafted sci-fi thriller that dou­bles as a wildly funny com­edy (an inten­tional one, I should be clear… more on that later), but the deli­cious sus­pense is nearly ruined in the end by the film­mak­ers’ over­con­fi­dence in their shoddy CGI alien.

The Shya­malan back­lash started as soon as The Sixth Sense, per­haps in direct cor­re­la­tion with its box office take, with peo­ple falling over them­selves claim­ing to have detected the Big Plot Reveal well ahead of time. But with The Vil­lage, the time for fans’ dither­ing began: if not nearly as bad as its crit­i­cal recep­tion, it was a dis­ap­point­ment. A promis­ing scernario sat­i­riz­ing the con­tem­po­rary sit­u­a­tion in Bush’s color-coded police state is sti­fled by a lack of humor unchar­ac­ter­is­tic for the direc­tor, not to men­tion an under­whelm­ing twist end­ing with­out the emo­tional punch of The Sixth Sense.

The clas­sic Shya­malan film is a schemat­icly con­structed jig­saw, which in itself is a great plea­sure. But in The Lady in the Water, the tail wags the dog to an even greater degree than The Vil­lage. Humor­less, pre­ten­tious, and forehead-slappingly… well, sorry for the cheap shot… stu­pid.

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