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July 30, 2004
July 30, 2004
Buena Vista Home Entertainment / Touchstone
PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Jayne Atkinson, Adrien Brody, Frank Collison, Jesse Eisenberg, Brendan Gleeson, Judy Greer, Charlie Hofheimer, Bryce Dallas Howard, William Hurt, Cherry Jones, John Christopher Jones, Fran Kranz, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Pitt (II), Pascale Renate Smith, Scott Sowers, Zack Wall, Sigourney Weaver, Celia Weston
"3.5 --- for half the movie you have no idea what's going on. Towards the end I still had no idea. But the suspenseful feeling of the movie makes up for it. Great acting!"
- projecthurley, gave it a 3/5
Even when his trademark twist-ending formula wears worrisomely thin as it does in The Village, M. Night Shyamalan is a true showman who knows how to serve up a spookfest. He's derailed this time by a howler of a "surprise" lifted almost directly from "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim," an episode of The Twilight Zone starring Cliff Robertson that originally aired in 1961. Even if you're unfamiliar with that Rod Serling scenario, you'll have a good chance of guessing the surprise, which ranks well below The Sixth Sense and Signs on Shyamalan's shock-o-meter. That leaves you to appreciate Shyamalan's proven strengths, including a sharp eye for fear-laden compositions, a general sense of unease, delicate handling of fine actors (alas, most of them wasted here, save for Bryce Dallas Howard in a promising debut), and the cautious concealment of his ruse, which in this case involves a 19th-century village that maintains an anxious truce with dreadful creatures that live in the forbidden woods nearby. Will any of this take anyone by genuine surprise? That seems unlikely, since Emperor Shyamalan has clearly lost his clothes in The Village, but it's nice to have him around to scare us, even if he doesn't always succeed. --Jeff Shannon - Amazon.com
