Come on, was anyone really surprised?

Rating: 7/10 (9 July 2006)

Imagine what seeing this film would have been like if you had known the ending in advance. All those oh-so-clever scenes where Willis's character alternates dialog with the character of his wife... they'd be about as gripping as a magic trick when you already know that it's done with mirrors.
Well, that's how it was for me. At the moment he meets the boy in the church, I turned to my wife and said, "He's ____." Honestly, I had not seen any of the promos, nor heard any of the hype, for this film. My wife picked it. So, when I got the "punch line" early, the next hour or so became a dreary, repetitious slog, with me dumbfounded by the inability of the rest of the audience (I spent about as much time watching them as watching the screen) to see what, I thought, was so blazingly obvious.
Great idea(s) in this film, but hanging so much of it on one "surprise" at the end was a dumb move, in my humble opinion. For those of us who saw it coming (and, really, I'm not the most perceptive fellow around; can so many folks have actually been fooled?), the surprise was that we were still awake to hear our neighbors gasp.