What's the hype?

Rating: 6/10 (18 September 1999)

This is a reasonably well written, well shoot and constructed film with no substance to mention, playing it safe and not daring to transgress the conventional Hollywood frames. Young Haley Joel Osman is the carrying force of this film and succeeds in receiving lots of empathy for his unhappy, fearful condition. Many scenes of this film are touching, and some scenes startling and slightly disturbing, but for the most part this film has been dumbed down to achieve maximum audience and profit. The good craftmanship of the film makers is being wasted in the director's lack of strength in his vision and edge. This is such a neat package of "horror" for cinematically uneducated and undemanding from a nice, compromising Spielberg school of directing.
Bruce Willis is not playing a moronic action-hero, but an introverted academic in his typical boring way. Comparing this film to "Exorcist", "Shining" or "Silence Of The Lambs" would constitute a blasphemy towards great masters of film making like William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick and Jonathan Demme.
This film is more of the calibre of "Flatliners" than aforementioned achievements. Sixth sense is a relatively insignificant, unchallenging mainstream film with really, nothing you haven't seen dozens of times before.