Unwatchable

Rating: 3/10 (3 January 2001)

This is a dire film. After seeing it, I had the desperate urge to go home and watch some paint dry. It does nothing, it says nothing, it goes nowhere...very, very slowly. After the excellent 'Sixth Sense' this is a very big disappointment. It's almost as though they thought 'Sixth Sense' was such a big success that they needed another idea immediately, to be made in the same style. And the style is very similar. Unfortunately, that, and the people it shares, is where the resemblance ends.
We have all the ingredients here for a bad film. The leading man can't act (I am not a Willis fan, although he was right for the role in 'Sixth Sense'). Samuel L Jackson looks truly bizarre and comes across as just plain annoying. Although even he pales in comparison to the kid, who is truly irritating. And as for Dunn's (Willis's) wife, she's just a complete non-entity. Quite frankly, I didn't care enough about any of these characters to give a damn what happened to them. In addition, too many of the characters mumbled incoherently (especially the school nurse - what the hell was she saying?). There is just about enough plot to make a short, certainly not a feature film, and the director makes up for this with long drawn out and frankly tedious sequences (the opening sequence on the train was so long and boring that I knew it was going to be a poor film within minutes), frequent extended shots of characters' faces and weird camera angles. There was, to be honest, nothing to hold one's interest at all. Even the twist at the end provoked no more than very vague surprise. Very poor.