That’s a good plan. I’ve done this before for movies I know are bad but I am still curious about. Saves a lot time.
I’ve had pretty good luck with Shyamalan overall:
Sixth Sense: Excellent
Unbreakable: Amazing, simply the best
Signs: My favorite guilty pleasure, I love to rewatch it. Secretly my favorite. Don’t tell anyone
The Village: I fell asleep in the theater, wasn’t great, but I’m sure the parts I slept through were great!
Lady in the Water: I don’t know why it offended me so much that he cast himself as a brilliant writer, but it really did. I was bored by the rest of the movie and fell asleep. I’ll assume the parts I slept through were brilliant, why not?
Split: Really good. It really was the return to form that I was hoping for.
Glass: I really enjoyed it. Not as good as Unbreakable or Split, but not bad.
I haven’t seen the rest.
I liked Devil. It’s probably objectively bad, but I liked it anyway.
This was one of the biggest divides I’ve ever seen between “Trailer looks great” and “this movie was bad.” Horribly disappointing to me, and when I started being really skeptical of his trailers.
I enjoyed The Village, agree with most of the rest of your list, but most of the stuff he’s done in the last ten years just seemed bad.
To be fair, Shyamalan didn’t direct Devil. He produced and wrote the story, but not the script.
I’m probably one of the few that enjoyed Lady in the Water. I liked the tone of the film and I have a soft spot for urban fantasy.
Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs are his best movies I’ve seen. Lady in Water I enjoyed, as I said. The rest got such bad reviews I skipped every one of them except Old. We felt like going to the movies on $5 movie night and Old seemed like the best candidate, so we tried it. Terrible movie.
I guess Split and Glass might be ok. I don’t like movies where women are held captive by insane killers so I skipped Split. I don’t know why I never saw Glass.
My partner and I enjoyed Lady in the Water a lot, as well!
I’m a fan of both Lady In the Water and The Village. The Visit was also really well done. Old (except for Thomasin McKenzie in a bikini) is simply terrible.
So this is out and…so yeah, it’s a good book, y’all should read that.
Shyamalan spends most of the movie making a pretty faithful, competent adaptation that gets the scenario and the characters pretty right. Bautista’s good. No real complaints about any of that. And then we get into the final act and off the cliff the movie goes. Firstly, the ending is pretty much the exact opposite of the book’s and what the book is trying to do. But even if you didn’t know that it’s insulting to your intelligence as a viewer, thuddingly obvious in every way. It’s just spectacularly awful.
But I guess he does tend to have a problem with endings. Sigh.
I saw Old at the theater. I’ve made my sacrifice for Shyamalan. I won’t pay to see one of his movies anytime soon. Thanks for taking the bullet.
I have a season pass at the Alamo. Also I had a free popcorn coupon that expired yesterday. So it wasn’t much of a payment really. :P
In brain cells, though…
Yeah, poor Paul Tremblay finally gets one of his excellent books made into a movie…and it’s Shyamalan.
The ending of the book sounds like just another kind of garbage, and almost too Cabin in the Woods-y at this point. The movie was awful outside of the performances, and had plot holes so big you could drive other entire Shyamalan movies through.
Split is probably his best film in quite a long time, probably because he had so little to do with the marketing of it, and hence, himself, and he was just there to kinda just make a movie. And somewhere along the way, I dunno when exactly (maybe during screenings), they were like, oh we should tie this back to Unbreakable.
— Alan
Somehow I totally missed that this movie was based on a Paul Tremblay book I had read. Not sure that I’m intrigued enough to actually see the movie though.
I couldn’t find a general Shyamalan movie thread, so this latest one will do.
I think the thread is titled something like “Shitty movies with dumb twists except for Unbreakable and Glass”.
No, Glass was shitty too.
— Alan
Glass is a movie-length “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” gag.
This was my least favorite Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Which I guess means I need to rank them for better context:
- Guardians 1
- Stuber
- Guardians 2
- Infinity Wars stuff
- Knock at the Cabin