I must say, before entering my M. Night Shyamalan rant, the only thing that surprised me Sunday was that ""Pan's Labyrinth"" didn't win Best Foreign Film. Otherwise, ""The Departed,"" Helen Mirren and no-bra Gwyneth's 1960s tablecloth dress were all about right.
Anyway, I'm starting to get concerned. Mostly about the fact the M. Night Shyamalan mustered six Oscar nominations out of his early masterpiece ""The Sixth Sense"" and has since garnered nothing but lukewarm to ice-cold reviews. This, I have to say, is not a case where I stand alone in loving a film (like ""The Day After Tomorrow""). Many smart, accomplished people I know and love are with me on this thing. This is a prime case of movie critic grudge-work.
Ever since ""The Sixth Sense,"" M. Night (yes, I'm going to call him M. Night) has introduced to us an army of individual, thought-provoking works of storytelling. His worst so far (in my opinion) has been ""The Village,"" but still, I was intrigued. If everybody who says they guessed the ending actually did, I pose this question: Which ending did you guess? Certainly, most of us deduced the monsters were a hoax early on in the film, but what were we to think come the final ending—the true ending, when everything we thought we knew about this world changes completely?
What M. Night utilizes in this film (like in ""The Sixth Sense"") is something he calls a ""chess game."" Last year on National Public Radio before the summer release of ""Lady in the Water,"" M. Night alluded to the fact his mantra has become the big twist in the end—the checkmate. This has also become the deciding factor in whether or not he'll reap a good review, which is odd, because only two M. Night movies I can think of actually utilize this so-called chess game: ""The Village"" and ""The Sixth Sense.""
Even ""Unbreakable"" was dissed for using a similar approach to its ending. Rolling Stone slammed M. Night for ""repeating himself"" too early in his career by using the twist—however, I beg to differ. One way for a filmmaker to become known is to create a sense of continuity within his work. Alfred Hitchcock (though I hate the comparison), Christopher Guest and Mel Brooks all created staple, masterful hits based on similar formulas. While I'm not about to admit that anything M. Night has done rivals ""Rear Window,"" ""Best in Show"" or ""Young Frankenstein,"" I will admit I think he's well-warranted and heavily preceded enough to establish his own thing. And whether crazy critics and grumpy film-goers want to admit it or not, he has succeeded.
But what about his other movies? The movies with endings that don't ride on the suspicion that M. Night plans to turn our worlds upside down in one, solitary moment, like ""Signs"" and ""Lady in the Water."" According to M. Night himself in his interview with NPR last summer, ""Signs"" is, surprisingly, his best-reviewed movie. I guess what I'm trying to say is that M. Night's dastardly surprise endings simply cannot be the only thing anybody (critics especially) should be considering when seeing one of his movies.
You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't judge a film by its ending. Yes, it's always great to wow them in the end (well, according to Charlie Kaufmann), but it's not everything. I watched ""The Sixth Sense"" for the first time in five years last month, and I was surprised by how easy the ending felt now that I've seen so many movies with better endings. It is my opinion the ""The Sixth Sense"" is nowhere near the best thing M. Night's given us thus far. And I'll get to that next week in my final installment of the Critics Suck Trilogy: Part III.
