The Village
In celebration of After Earth, the new M. Night. Shyamalan movie too ashamed of M. Night Shyamalan to mention his name in the trailer, I’ve decided to review one of my most hated movies: The Village. It’s the one movie that made me ask for my money back, and put such a nasty stigma on every actor/actress involved I didn’t see anything from each of them for a long, long time.
To people who actually thought The Six Sense was good, The Village fortunately showed them Shyamalan’s true colors. By this time he was known for his “twisty” plotting and homespun morality, so Shyamalan twists this movie by twisting the very purpose of a twist. In other words, Shyamalan throws out two twists so stupid and draining the only suspense is how many audience members will stay to the end just to throw bodily fluid at the screen. It’s as if Shyamalan is deliberately trying to unscrew his plot by giving up on his former righty-tighty formula and going so lefty-loosey he strips the plot bare of interest and leaves you with a hole in your head.
The Village concerns a village, naturally, populated by actors with law suits they’re so desperate to settle out-of-court they signed on without even reading the script, living in an idyllic pastoral expect for one little problem. The community also lives in a tentative peace with some woodsy creature people, probably the same tentative peace Shyamalan shares with his neighbors.
The creatures themselves are actually a morbid variation of Santa Claus, a boogey man used to keep within the village the young and, in Adrian Brody’s case, the dumb as the rock Bob Seger likes to roll. John Wayne Gacy probably told his children there was a child-eating pale man in the crawl space for similar reasons. Thus, the adults put on costumes that look like Porcupines of Unusual Size and go trick-or-treating, and at one point mutilate a cat instead of just telling the children to stay out of the woods and beating their asses if they don’t.
Brody gets so bored he attempts to kill Joaquin Phoenix, which forces the elders to allow a blind girl go journey into the woods alone for medicine. Yes, they let a blind girl go wandering alone and unarmed because she’s blind. This brings me to the other twist: it’s not 1700. The “Village” is a cult living in a modern day national forest to get away from the violent real world. Thus the blind girl is the only one who can vulnerably venture off into said violent world for medicine to heal a man severally wounded by tard-raged violence. It's an ironic as well as fallacious move, but these people are living in a permanent LARP paradise.
She gets some penicillin or whatever and goes back to the village triumphant, all while the FBI, ATF and DEA plot to storm the woods in a Waco-like rampage. That’s at least what I like to think happened, because at the end of this movie it becomes a Mobius Turd that loops back on itself and leaves all constipated plot points unresolved. Will Phoenix survive and marry the girl too blind to see his hair-lip and too young to remember his porn obsession in Parenthood? Will she expose the adults for their sorry scam, allowing the young to run free into oncoming traffic? Will the somber motorist who ploughs them down wonder when the Renaissance Fair starting passing out acid and having Frogger competitions?
The only satisfying thing about The Village is Adrian Brody, who puts on a costume and goes after the blind girl and falls to his hilarious death in a tiger trap. Why was a hole with spikes covered with brush even in the woods? Anthony Hopkins from The Edge must have stumbled upon The Village, and figured he’d give Brody something to think about before starring in Splice. Brody slept with the goat/eagle/pig/lion/tiger/bear thing anyway, but that’s another story.
To people who actually thought The Six Sense was good, The Village fortunately showed them Shyamalan’s true colors. By this time he was known for his “twisty” plotting and homespun morality, so Shyamalan twists this movie by twisting the very purpose of a twist. In other words, Shyamalan throws out two twists so stupid and draining the only suspense is how many audience members will stay to the end just to throw bodily fluid at the screen. It’s as if Shyamalan is deliberately trying to unscrew his plot by giving up on his former righty-tighty formula and going so lefty-loosey he strips the plot bare of interest and leaves you with a hole in your head.
The Village concerns a village, naturally, populated by actors with law suits they’re so desperate to settle out-of-court they signed on without even reading the script, living in an idyllic pastoral expect for one little problem. The community also lives in a tentative peace with some woodsy creature people, probably the same tentative peace Shyamalan shares with his neighbors.
The creatures themselves are actually a morbid variation of Santa Claus, a boogey man used to keep within the village the young and, in Adrian Brody’s case, the dumb as the rock Bob Seger likes to roll. John Wayne Gacy probably told his children there was a child-eating pale man in the crawl space for similar reasons. Thus, the adults put on costumes that look like Porcupines of Unusual Size and go trick-or-treating, and at one point mutilate a cat instead of just telling the children to stay out of the woods and beating their asses if they don’t.
Brody gets so bored he attempts to kill Joaquin Phoenix, which forces the elders to allow a blind girl go journey into the woods alone for medicine. Yes, they let a blind girl go wandering alone and unarmed because she’s blind. This brings me to the other twist: it’s not 1700. The “Village” is a cult living in a modern day national forest to get away from the violent real world. Thus the blind girl is the only one who can vulnerably venture off into said violent world for medicine to heal a man severally wounded by tard-raged violence. It's an ironic as well as fallacious move, but these people are living in a permanent LARP paradise.
She gets some penicillin or whatever and goes back to the village triumphant, all while the FBI, ATF and DEA plot to storm the woods in a Waco-like rampage. That’s at least what I like to think happened, because at the end of this movie it becomes a Mobius Turd that loops back on itself and leaves all constipated plot points unresolved. Will Phoenix survive and marry the girl too blind to see his hair-lip and too young to remember his porn obsession in Parenthood? Will she expose the adults for their sorry scam, allowing the young to run free into oncoming traffic? Will the somber motorist who ploughs them down wonder when the Renaissance Fair starting passing out acid and having Frogger competitions?
The only satisfying thing about The Village is Adrian Brody, who puts on a costume and goes after the blind girl and falls to his hilarious death in a tiger trap. Why was a hole with spikes covered with brush even in the woods? Anthony Hopkins from The Edge must have stumbled upon The Village, and figured he’d give Brody something to think about before starring in Splice. Brody slept with the goat/eagle/pig/lion/tiger/bear thing anyway, but that’s another story.