Leaden, portentous, unreal

Rating: 3/10 (10 August 2002)

M Night has a style that is annoying. Seemed to work for me in 6th Sense, but the next 2 -- yuck. His stilted directing style loads lead weights onto the characters and makes the poor actors struggle to be able to create living, breathing people. Unfortunately, in this movie, the actors pretty much sink under M Night's heavy hands, w/the notable exception of Cherry Jones as Officer Paski. Of course, she has the BIG advantage of not being in that "locked in the house" segment, which went on & on & on &... , well you get the idea. She brought the movie up from being a 1 for me, and the first 1/2 hr or so seemed to be going somewhere. But then, yawn time. It's amazing, usually I dislike movies for too many special effects and not enough character development. Now here's a man who brings NO special effects and still NO character development. Yuck.