A film that holds up for about one hour and then stumbles and falls.

Rating: Null/10 (7 September 2004)

I won't elaborate much on the plot of 'The Village' due to fact that Director M. Night Shyamalan loves to tell stories where secrets and big revelations are the key to hold the movie together. What I will tell you is that the film doesn't hold together very well.
M. Night Shyamalan is without doubts a very talented director with great skills in creating intriguing atmospheres. He knows how to give a special sense of tension to a particular scene. The problem with Shyamalan is that he thinks he's a good writer, and in the case of The Village this is far from the truth.
The Village is wonderful to look at. The cinematography is great and there are several moments of hypnotic beauty, but these aspects are not enough to prevent the film from falling down. The way the story is unfolded is awful. The climax of the movie is anticlimactic (big contradiction here). The scares are so sporadic that the tension they generate soon evaporates in scenes of silliness and bad dialog.
The acting is uneven. Bryce Dallas Howard starts very strong as Ivy (a brave young blind woman moved by love) but her screen presence looses intensity by the end of the picture. Joaquin Phoenix is adequate without shinning. Sigourney Weaver and Brendan Gleeson are both criminally underused. The two standouts are William Hurt as the Village's leader and Adrien Brody as a mentally challenged young man. These two performances deserve a much better movie.
This is a film that holds up for about one hour and then stumbles and falls. Is overlong and at times hopes for the audience to lower its level of intelligence so it can get away with its poorly written plot.