Go on, fill in the blank. Unbearable. Unwatchable. Un...

Rating: Null/10 (26 November 2000)

Some pop-culture mysteries I can get. I get Britney Spears. I get, in a cerebral way, "Survivor" and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. I even get, in a more detached way, "The Bridges of Madison County" or "The Celestine Prophecies." What I don't get, is M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan's two blockbusters, SIXTH SENSE and this ten-ton doozy, are like student-film clunkers stretched out and made as heavy as the late works of Stanley Kubrick. But where Kubrick, pre-EYES WIDE SHUT, used the lugubriousness of his filmmaking to create a sense of everlasting mystery, of standing above an abyss, Shyamalan uses portentousness to make routine studio-movie writing seem weighty--"spiritual." In THE SIXTH SENSE, Shyamalan took an eternity to tell us the obvious--! Here, he lets on fairly early that his everyman hero (Bruce Willis) is some sort of superhero or god--but then what? As Shyamalan pads towards his trademark Whammy Ending, the actors stare at one another and talk...like...this. The whole movie is shot in masters, with the actors talking slow as we stare at their reflections in TV sets, mirrors, mottled windows. To a generation that has never seen THE SHINING, and may possibly have seen a few minutes of THE EXORCIST while flitting through the multiplex en route to a Freddie Prinze picture, Shyamalan's elephantine style may seem impressive. But is there any big-ticket moviemaker today, even James Cameron, who writes worse dialogue? ("Is there a name?" a doctor asks a woman holding a newborn in the movie's opening sequence--what pediatrician would not use a pronoun?) The primness and expository quality of Shyamalan's writing suggests a well-brought-up writing-class student who has, shall we say, not much touched life. But hey! most folks say, if you quibble. The guy makes a LOT OF MONEY! I can't think of a movie this year I disliked quite as much as this one--not even CHARLIE'S ANGELS, which, moronic as it is, at least moves quickly, and seems concerned with providing the audience the incidental pleasures of movies--pretty girls and jokes. Shyamalan is like a dime-novel writer who somehow has talked himself into thinking he's Dostoevsky. In an age when Shyamalan, McG and George W rule the roost, one can only quote Clint Eastwood at the end of A PERFECT WORLD: "I don't know any thing any more...not a goddam thing."