M. Night Shyamalan's worst movie yet, slow and sleep-inducing in the beginning, manipulative and cheap in the end.

Rating: 4/10 (10 August 2004)

It's become clearer and clearer to me that with the success of `The
Sixth Sense', M. Night Shyamalan may be just a one-trick pony.
What was a well-written and well-acted drama with tension and a
shock ending worthy of a classic has given way to a trilogy of
progressively worse movies that seem created more just to justify
a clichéd shock ending than to provide a coherent or meaningful
story, and this comes to a crux with `The Village'. Even
`Unbreakable', with its snore-inducingly drab color palette and
lighting, which put me to sleep at both screenings I attended for it,
had a somewhat interesting human story that held up surprisingly
well when I saw it on TV recently. `Signs', despite the same
boring first Act, villains whose actions made no sense, and plot
holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through, had genuinely
SCARY moments. `The Village,' however, lacks any of these
virtues, but whose first 35 minutes (and some intermittent
moments afterwards) is of that same flat quality that works better
than NyQuil, and whose ending doesn't seem so much as a
shocker as it does an offensive hoax.
The movie is set in (I believe) the 1800's, in an isolated
Pennsylvania village surrounded by the Covington Woods, into
which the villagers are forbidden to cross, lest they disrupt the
truce between the village and Those We Do Not Speak Of,
demonic creatures that even in their first obscured appearance in
the film, do not look scary, but rather merely silly, resembling the
Scarecrow monster in the current story arc that just wrapped in
`Batman.' There is not a single scary moment in this film,
absolutely nothing in the way of suspense, character development,
or an interesting plot in the first forty or so minutes of the film, until
a character's contrived serious injury requires the film's female
heroine, Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard-director Ron's daughter), to
venture forth into `the towns' to find medicine, at which point the
Shyamalan Shocking Revelation is revealed, which unlike those in
Shyamalan's previous three films, resembles more a massive
scam than it does a plot twist, a scam perpetrated on both the
characters AND the audience, and if you didn't figure out until this
scene that Ivy's blindness was contrived to mesh with this
eventual plot twist, then perhaps you haven't been watching a lot of
Shyamalan films. Or many films period.
Edward Walker (William Hurt) tells Lucius (Joaquim Phoenix) that
he is fearless in a way that he will never be. Damn right, Edward.
Most people who suffer from grief eventually get over it. You and
your fellow rejects, on the other hand, were so cowardly that rather
than face your pain, you not only retreated from society, but
decided to engineer a massive lie to your children to cover up the
truth, when you could very easily have retreated from society and
lived a simpler existence without making the kids believe that they
were living in a past century, complete with silly bogeyman
costumes, and your idiotic insistence on using antiquated
phrases in your speech like `fortnight.'
It is at the point of this `revelation' that the entire movie doesn't
seem at all like a journey in which insight is made in terms of
characters or themes, or the audience is treated to even a
plausible plot (Shyamalan explains that airspace is restricted over
the wildlife preserve in which the village is located, but doesn't
explain how that small group of founders transported all the
building materials necessary to build all those nice-looking
homes and town halls), but just one big practical joke; a pointless
exercise in how to maintain a color-by-numbers format that
Shyamalan seems to insist for all of his films, such as the
obligatory Pennsylvania setting, the use of the color red as a plot
harbinger (as it was in `The Sixth Sense'-in `Unbreakable' and
`Signs' it was water), and of course, Shyamalan's patented
Shoehorned-Into-The-Story appearance, which is thankfully kept to
a minimum, as it takes the form of mostly a voice and a minor
reflection in the glass door of a medicine cabinet. Hey, Night!
Wanna come up with a new schtick? It's getting kind of old, ya
know.