A Stinker

Rating: 3/10 (20 March 2005)

This might have made an effective little Z-movie, filmed in black-and-white with about 25 minutes shorn off the running time. It might have done had it been made 50 years ago and seen at a midnight movie drive-in. But then it wouldn't have had the pretentious twists that M Night Shyalaman feels obliged to foist on his audience. What was clever and even unsettling in "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" became just silly, if still a little scary in "Signs", and here is spun out interminably until boredom overtakes any sense of dread. This is a kid's fairy-tale scare picture without the scares, a morality tale with no moral.
A stellar cast (and that includes the Best Actor Oscar winner of two years ago, Adrien Brody) manage to keep straight faces and act with a high seriousness bordering on insanity. In Jaoquin Phoenix it has a hero so unprepossessing as to be virtually non-existent. Am I missing something? Is there another layer underneath all this tosh full of profound meaning and subterfuge? 'Fraid not; what you see is what you get and it's a stinker.