VILLAGE, THE
Released: July 30, 2004
William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Adrien Brody and Joaquin Phoenix plus a bunch of other decent actors all try to stumble through M. Night Shyamalan's latest twist film. Not satisfied with merely one good twist like "The Sixth Sense", Shyamalan piles on multiple twists in a story that he wrote solely to frame the twists. All logic must be put on hold as we watch preambles to story twists that are, when thought about, plain silly. I will not go into details for the benefit of first time viewers but essentially we get to watch what looks like an 1890 Amish community that never strays from it's defined village borders. What lies beyond those borders? No one in the village knows because these dressed-in-red-robes monsters might get you. When you get to see what happens when someone (a blind character played by Ron Howard's daughter Bryce Dallas Howard) goes outside the village to "the towns", your mind will be boggled by the silliness of the situation. Shyamalan writes in specific loopholes so the story can proceed the way he wants, regardless how improbable it is. I can hold my sense of logic in movies but when something purporting to be serious is so oblivious to basic common sense, it takes me out of the movie. Shyamalan also relies on loud sounds or music to generate scares for the audience, which is overused and cheap. I appreciate Shyamalan's attempt here but he tries too hard to give us story twists that it leaves us no story or characters worth paying attention to.
108 Minutes
Touchstone/Buena Vista