Don't Believe The Hype

Rating: 4/10 (22 January 2005)

If M. Night Shyamalan's cinematic style were a dance, it would have to be The Twist. He loves to give us that unexpected, Rod Serling-style revelation that turns everything on its head and has us replaying the movie in our minds, filing cogent clues and red herrings in the appropriate mental folders. But it may be that after The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs this popular writer/director has us so conditioned to look for a shocking twist that we go in with heightened, even unrealistic expectations.
This film's producer, Scott Rudin, told Entertainment Weekly, the thing he was wrestling with is that the audience is waiting for (the twist). You can ask, could he make The Sixth Sense now? The minute the kid says "I see dead people" would you immediately go to 'Bruce Willis is dead?' Every one of these movies raises the bar higher and makes it harder to deliver any kind of sleight of hand. He's right. Which may explain why the theater audience I spent the evening with filed out of The Village looking like kids at an amusement park who had just stood in an hour-long line for a roller coaster that never left the platform. The prevailing reaction was disappointment. Instead of a supercharged adventure, what they got was a soberly paced, feature-length thriller that might have worked better as a half-hour Twilight Zone episode. At least then the payoff would have been proportionate to our investment. Some members of the crowd even seemed ticked. I can understand why. Disney's marketing department set them up to see a certain kind of movie (the tag line reads, "Run. The Truce Is Ending"). It didn't deliver and they felt conned. But let's face it, in Shyamalan's world, it's all about setting the audience up for the twist, right? If only his final revelation was a whiz-bang wonder worthy of water-cooler conversation. (Most people will see it coming a mile away.) What is worth talking about besides the emergence of Ron Howard's daughter in her first screen role is the film's interesting subtext. The Village works very well as a metaphor infused with socially significant ideas and transcendent themes. Of course, most viewers will be too busy trying to track Shyamalan's cinematic sleight of hand to follow it on that level. That's too bad. Given the chance to be more than mood-altering summer eye candy, The Village contains subtle, intellectual challenges for mature audiences with very little troubling content. That may be small consolation for action-hungry horror fans trying to predict the twist and avoid falling asleep in their popcorn. What does it take for a manipulative director to lose his credibility with a mass audience? It takes a Village.