*This* surprised people? Slow movie, good performances

Rating: 6/10 (24 April 2000)

Finally, I watched The Sixth Sense in April 2000 on the DVD I had purchased a week earlier. I had tried very hard to avoid any discussion of the movie (as I always do with any movie) until I had a chance to see it. The one thing I had heard (before I could change the TV channel) was that there was a "big surprise" at the end.
Now, I am an average guy, maybe a bit above average in education. And I will try not to give away the "surprise" here, in case you haven't seen the movie, yet. But the "big surprise" was obvious to me 17 minutes into the film. It was so obvious to me by the time it was "revealed" that I had thought, in a scene where the boy and the doc agree that their therapy is over, that both parties *already acknowledged* the surprise in that scene and were saying goodbye. At the time, I thought, with some admiration, "This is a pretty subtle way to make that realization occur." So imagine my confusion when a few minutes later we get the big, dramatic scene where one of the characters *finally* does realize what's what. I was in disbelief ... "You mean he *didn't know*?" I wondered.
I don't get it. "The Crying Game" had a "big surprise" that was obvious as soon as they showed the "female" character's face. And now this. Am I somehow amazingly intuitive or is everyone else slow? I mean, when you see the doc sitting in the boy's apartment across from the mother and *no one is talking* doesn't that give you a big clue? And the fact that earlier no one seemed irked at the loud conversation in the church? And once you realize that, and note similar instances as the movie progresses, isn't it obvious?
Perhaps because I saw no surprise, this movie seemed very slow to me. A lot of worried looks on the kid's face as he avoid various feelings or actual encounters with dead people. And very few interactions with the dead people. To me, the best scene by far was at the wake for the little girl who died. The movie should have had 2-3 additional examples like that, instead of a lot of peeking around corners by the boy.
Still, the actors did a very good job. For that reason alone I gave this movie a 5.