Has the United States become the land of the slow and the home of the dim?

Rating: Null/10 (7 September 1999)

In the opening sequence, a child psychiatrist (Bruce Willis) is shot in the guts by an adult patient, a raving loony, who has broken into his home. In the scenes that follow, set a year later, the shrink meets up with a small boy who claims to see and hear the dead--imperceptible to everyone else around him. Since the shrink is never spoken to by anyone else in the movie, and the kid is the "only one who hears voices," the Stunning Surprise Ending that's promised is about as stunning and surprising as the end of a Polish joke. It's an indescribable experience to sit in an auditorium full of people who are held rapt by this brainingly obvious hooey. The writer-director, M. Night Shmyahan, has studied THE EXORCIST and THE SHINING, and, considering those films clearly too violent for this genteel moment in moviemaking, has taken one element from them--numbing, lugubrious slowness. He has made one commercially sound choice: If this material were played any quicker, its thinness and obviousness would smack the audience in the face like a coal shovel. How a huge audience can be magnetized by amateurish, headless, suspenseless pap like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and THE SIXTH SENSE in the same summer is beyond my reckoning. The lesson of SENSE and WITCH's success seems to be: Telling a story to a movie audience now is like telling a joke to a very slow twelve-year-old. And remember: Before you hit the punchline, go back and deliver a few of the set-ups twice.