I must admit to taking a certain cruel and malicious pleasure in watching the disintegration of M. Night Shyamalan. The director who came to prominence with the superb occult thriller The Sixth Sense, and followed it up with the intriguing though flawed Unbreakable, has been on a downward spiral for some time. Signs had some powerful moments but didn't quite work. And then there was The Village, surely one of the very worst movies to come out of Hollywood in the last, oh, hundred years - a movie so pretentious, dull, nonsensical, labored, and incoherent that it makes Ed Wood look like John Ford.
Along the way, Shyamalan has become more and more full of himself - taking larger roles in his own movies, hawking the American Express card on TV, and bloviating about his own unappreciated genius. He is supported by the usual enablers - dizzy fans who think their hero can do no wrong, lazy critics who write positive reviews of movies they slept through, studio execs who don't dare say a discouraging word to a director who's currently hot.
Well, he ain't so hot anymore. His latest release, Lady in the Water, is underperforming at the box office even as it is raked over the coals by critics and eviscerated by word of mouth. This should come as no surprise. The script for Lady was so poor that Disney passed on the project despite Shyamalan's strong commercial track record. When a studio as money-hungry as Disney lets a brand-name director like Shyamalan get away, you know the script must have sucked like an Electrolux. Perhaps the fact that Shyamalan based the script on a bedtime story he told his children was a harbinger of things to come. Bedtime stories, after all, rarely make much sense ... and are mainly intended induce sleep.
Now the movie is out, and the reviews are in. For fun, I ventured over to Rotten Tomatoes to see how Lady in the Water was faring on their Tomatomometer - a roundup of critical commentary from print media, TV and radio, and the Net. The verdict: Rotten.
Here are some of the choicer comments.
"Have you ever been approached by someone who was really drunk, and they tell you some rambling, incoherent story? Well, that's what watching this movie is like." -- Mike McGranaghan, AISLE SEAT
"Crazy as this might sound, it turns out that self-indulgent ramblings designed to put your children to sleep are pretty much the opposite of art." -- Liam Lacey, GLOBE AND MAIL
"Lady in the Water isn't just another disappointment. It's a jaw-dropping catastrophe -- a picture so wrong-headedly intoxicated with itself you view it through an embarrassed haze." -- Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
"Who am I to knock the work of the man who, in his own film, casts himself as a writer whose ideas will inspire a future leader who will save the world -- an artist whose work will not be fully understood in his own time, but only many years later?" -- Jim Emerson, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
"The story is exceedingly dull; to become involved in it would require not just a suspension of disbelief, but a suspension of mental faculties altogether. [A] bewildering misstep for a director of Shyamalan's caliber." -- Kurt Loder, MTV
"In Lady in the Water, Shyamalan's descent into self-parody is complete." -- Shawn Levy, OREGONIAN
"When film historians discuss what happens when a filmmaker of limited talent has a huge success and then goes out of control, this is the movie that will be cited." -- Daniel M. Kimmel, WORCESTER TELEGRAM & GAZETTE
"Far-fetched is the kindest thing to say about Lady in the Water, a disjointed and mind-numbing story." -- Diana Saenger, REVIEWEXPRESS.COM
"Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date." -- Lisa Schwarzbaum, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
"Hollywood cannot pollute the ozone with anything more idiotic, contrived, amateurish or sub-mental than Lady in the Water." -- Rex Reed, NEW YORK OBSERVER
"You won't see anything else like it this summer, and you'll be really glad about that." -- Frank Swietek, ONE GUY'S OPINION
"Lady in the Water marks M. Night Shyamalan's official leap off the deep end. Not everyone agrees on Shyamalan's talent as a filmmaker, but few, up till now, have questioned his sanity." -- Dana Stevens, SLATE
"Silly and sappy ... Shyamalan continues on his steady descent in quality." -- Steve Rhodes, INTERNET REVIEWS
"An act of spectacular (if unwitting) self-immolation." -- Lou Lumenick, NEW YORK POST
"M. Night Shyamalan doesn't have an ego problem. He's just a humble screenwriter and director who makes himself a star of his own movie -- as a character who is a writer, whose words will save the world from despair and destruction." -- Michael Booth, DENVER POST
"A screenplay so eye-rollingly dippy that it plays out like something a bunch of second graders cooked up on a rainy day playing fort in the living room." -- Donald Munro, FRESNO BEE
"Stunningly self-indulgent claptrap." -- Nell Minow, MOVIE MOM AT YAHOO! MOVIES
"'Narf' and 'scrunt' are more than weird character names. They are the sounds you may involuntarily make while watching this thing." -- Michael Elliott, MOVIE PARABLES
"Has M. Night Shyamalan lost his damn mind?" -- Sean Burns, PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY
"Embarrassing. Stupid. Incomprehensible. A mess. Absurd. Fake." -- Boo Allen, DENTON RECORD CHRONICLE (TX)
"Shyamalan's latest exercise in foundering pretension may be the silliest movie of all time. Seriously. ... Will someone please lock up this pompous stiff in Johnny Depp's Dead Man's Chest and throw away the key?" -- Thomas Delapa, BOULDER WEEKLY
"I just want to punch this movie right in the face." -- David Cornelius, EFILMCRITIC.COM
"You wonder if Shyamalan has crossed from mere self-regard into actual mental illness." -- Josh Bell, LAS VEGAS WEEKLY
And finally, the most devastating comment of all:
"Lady in the Water doesn't have even The Village's slim virtues." -- Andy Klein, LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT
Ouch.
Recent Comments