the most incompetent and facile film-making i've ever seen

Rating: Null/10 (2 August 2004)

I could go on and on about how horrendously, farcically terrible this career nosedive botch-job is, but I'll limit my comments to a few of its most outstanding offenses. forget about the allegorical levels of the movie for a minute (or, in my case, ignore them out of boredom and disinterest) which are so inconsequential, veiled to the point of almost utter transparency, that it would probably be as easy to interpret "white chicks" as a 9/11 parable as well.
The most glaring problems of this film, as a matter of fact, are not very complex or difficult to observe. Not even the utter lack of suspense (unless you count jumping from your seat at sudden loud noises on the soundtrack suspenseful) contributes overall to the brutal mediocrity of Shyamalan's ego-stroking pomposity. It's simply that this film shows not a single instance of film-making ingenuity, much less competence. It's not just that the film is poorly paced, terribly acted, ponderously staged, incoherently conceived, and deceptively marketed; it's the sheer absence of everything that absolutely must be in place for even the most modest of film productions to succeed: clear visual ideas, confident editing, a rhythm to the narrative, a script that survived more than a single set of revisions, the sense that the director is invested in what's in the frame. "The Village" exhibits Shyamalan's brazen indifference to nuanced characters, dynamic framing (i.e. staging scenes with characters on different planes of space, rather than standing on a single axis in the middle of the frame), editing that doesn't suck the life out of every frame...
To me, however, the most offensive element of the film has to be the dialogue, which is blatantly inconsiderate to an actor. If you've ever tried to write a script and give it to actors to read, then you must have experienced some sense of responsibility in giving your collaborators something which won't inevitably come out stilted, flat, inane and anachronistic. some of the preposterous lines Shyamalan inflicts on his actors is so embarrassing that it borders on cruelty. but truthfully the film doesn't exhibit a single drop of concern for real human life or emotion; Shyamalan, nominally a "suspense" director, seems so preoccupied with keeping his "twist" (which is about as surprising as a hangover) intact that he sacrifices virtually everything from the cinematography to the fundamental comprehensibility of the story in order to protect it. as far as I could tell, the one moment where the director seemed concerned with showing us anything remarkable was when he ever-so-deftly inserted himself in a cameo role that could seriously not be more contrived and obvious if he had a name-tag on. I had never seen the man before and it was so painfully obvious who he was that I felt ashamed to even be paying attention.
that being said, this movie is so entirely inept that it's almost funny. and as someone who watches a lot of overstuffed bad films for scraps of humor, i have to say that the insufferable atmosphere of inattention that pervades this film stifles even the bits of laughter brought on by the inconceivably contrived dialogue (the bit about the magic rocks, and "the old shed which we do not use") and by Adrien Brody's oblivious performance, who will go down in history as the most laughably, woefully over-performed village idiot in the history of cinema, just as the Howard girl will forever be remembered as the least convincing blind person in any movie ever made (and that includes Ben Affleck, which is saying so much that it feels like my teeth might fall out). if you want to see a movie with dialogue, acting, and direction just as bad, but funnier by the power of ten, then I would recommend "Dreamcatcher", a film that at least has some buried sense of campy irony somewhere. Sitting through "The Village" is like dying slowly of gangrene while watching your parents set penicillin on fire to light crackpipes before your pediatrician puts cigarettes out on your forearm.