An average movie

What makes difficult to review this movie is the fact that M. Night Shyamalan has now become the laughtingstock of the movie world (even though most of his movies are still financially successful) but we shouldn’t forget that when this movie was released, he was still a promising and highly regarded director. Anyway, many people think that it started to go bad for him with this movie but I don’t agree. In my opinion, it is with the awful ‘Lady in the water’ that his career went down the drain. Until then, all his movies were pretty decent, very well directed, nothing really mind-blowing but usually pretty entertaining (yeah, I’m not a fan of ‘The Sixth Sense’ which is one of the most overrated movies ever made in my opinion). This movie is not an exception. The directing was pretty awesome, really atmospheric which reminded me of Hitchock, there was a pretty cool cast (Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson, Michael Pitt, Jesse Eisenberg) and they all delivered some solid performances. Unfortunately, as usual with Shyamalan, the story was rather disappointing. I mean, it was really entertaining and it managed to keep me on the edge of my seat until the end but, then, the twist (again!) kind of ruined the whole thing for me. I mean, for the 4th time in a row (‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘Unbreakable’, ‘Signs’), Shyamalan ended up the proceedings with yet another half-baked twist... Basically, in my opinion, the guy is a very talented director but a rather poor writer and if someone (good) would write his screenplays, we might end up with something interesting. Still, to conclude, if you forget the hype for a minute, it is actually a decent and entertaining thriller and it is definitely worth a look.

6/10