Shock schlock

Rating: 5/10 (6 December 2018)

First let me say that UNBREAKABLE was one of my favorite all time films. At the same time LADY IN THE WATER was one of my least favorite. M is a writer/director that tends to run the gamut from genius to ridiculous. In this film he accomplishes neither, winding up with a mediocre presentation that could have been so very much better if he hadn't decided to jump the shark several times.
Many claim this movie deserves 8-10 stars and I can understand why. It has all the wrapped-in-a-box elements for a thriller-shocker, including a twist on the main premise-- that of a man with multiple personality disorder.
However if we step back and view this film objectively we see marks of what have made many of Shyamalan's movies box office flops. While many applaud McAvoy's acting in this, from a professional point of view any decent actor could have pulled off the varied-but-2-dimensional cliche personalities portrayed. None of the personalities were individually all that deep, nor did they require any significant acting chops to pull off nuances.
Sometimes a single expression on an actors face or a phrase uttered a specific way immortalizes both character and actor. We really see none of this here. What we find instead are very-straight-forward portrayals of very-defined personalities, without the subtleties that could have made this film great.
One of the chief flaws in the film is Shy's decision to push the edges of the theme into near-supernatural instead of keeping it within the realm of believability. This "jump the shark" tendency has ruined more than one of his films. In this case, keeping the story grounded in plausible reality would have made it far more believable, and far more interesting.
MILD SPOILER ALERT. Stop here if you haven't seen the movie or read other reviews here-- because pretty much everyone knows about this by now.
It would have been believable if the "beast" character was super-strong because of the personality's boosting his adrenaline system. But changing his actual genetic code? That took this from the previously-interesting premise into just more of M's "doesn't know when to not cross the line" writing.
But it was the cringe-worthy gratuitous gore scenes at the end that spoiled the movie for me. Put simply: they were not essential to the plot, did not make the movie better, were not necessary. The movie might have even been better if Shy had decided on some other method of revealing the evil of the character rather than choosing cannibalism. If that choice wasn't bad enough, to be graphically clear the guy must have had his head half deep in his victims-- but then later showed pretty much no trace of blood on his body. This was simply unrealistic, since such as presented in the movie would have literally covered him in gore. Not only were those scenes unnecessary to the advancement of the plot (a poor choice thrown in just as shock schlock)-- they weren't realistic. That throws in bad directing on top of the existing insult.
Was the film interesting? Exciting? Hold the audience's attention all the way through? Yes. Was it cliche, predictable, unrealistic and "too much"? Yes. It was a blend of potential brilliance marred by "Well, we can certainly see what's coming next" all the way through it.
As such this is not one of M's better movies. I found it disappointingly mundane, a story with great potential but filled with little to distinguish it from other movies of this genre. Subjectively it may appeal to some individuals. Objectively... it's simply not very good film making.