The Village

December 10, 2004

Rated: PG-13 Runtime: 120 min Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

I’ve wondered if M. Night Shyamalan was capable of making a bad movie, and now I know the answer is yes! The Village is too long, too boring and too stupid to be worth watching.

The Village

As with all Shyamalan movies, part of the deal is to see if you can guess the ending before it’s revealed. So far, he’s got a perfect record on this as I didn’t figure out the ending to The Village in advance. The problem is that I really didn’t care, I just wanted the credits to start rolling so I could leave.

Here’s the basic setup of the movie, and I’m not going to give anything away that’s not in the trailer. There are people living in a village surrounded by woods filled with creatures. The creatures leave the villagers alone as long as they stay out of the woods and don’t display the color red in any way. Of course when you’re told you can’t do something that makes you want to do it that much more, so the villagers are poking at the boundary on occasion. The creatures don’t like this and pay a visit to the town and leave behind signs as a warning.

That’s it, can’t say anything else about the plot without possibly giving something away. I do have a strong temptation here to give you the option to read what the ending is though to remove any possibility that you’ll want to waste your time and money on the movie, but that’s against the rules around here so I’ll hold my tongue.

The acting and presentation is fine, but damn is this thing boring! I must have checked my watch at least 10 times in hopes that it was almost over. My first check was about 30 minutes in, and I made an audible groan when I saw the time, and several people around me were in agreement. That’s another sign of a bad movie, the audience was almost silent when it was over and they shuffled to the door. I was the last person out, and the credits were only half way through. You could just see the anguish on the faces of my fellow moviegoers as we passed those about to enter the theater. We all wanted to shout out the ending in hopes of saving these poor souls the torment we just went through, but alas that wouldn’t be fair and everyone kept quiet.

On the other hand, go see it. Try to figure out the ending before it comes. That way I won’t have been alone in my wasting of time. The ONLY reason this movie is getting 2 stars instead of one is that I didn’t figure out the ending, and I think that ought to be worth something. Not much, but something.

Posted by John | Filed Under 2 Stars, Adrien Brody, Bryce Dallas Howard, Drama, Joaquin Phoenix, Judy Greer, PG-13, Theatrical, William Hurt