Oh My Sweet, Titty-Fucking Christ

In the third ever post to this blog, I tore into M. Night Shyamalan for his perfectly awful The Village. I'm not sure about this, but it may be the reason I started this blog to begin with: to tear on Shyamalan's repertoire of terrible films. So, it should come as no surprise that, a year and a half later, I'd be ripping into him for his stupefyingly shitty Lady in the Water.

There are so many things wrong with this fucking movie that to not chronicle them all would be doing a disservice to you, the reader. First off, this movie has the stupidest plot EVER. Worse yet, there is a character that knows the plot, and is able to recite it whenever the other characters need some direction. I've heard of and seen movies in which you can "see" the screenplay at work, but this is the first one in which it's actually read during the movie. Even worse than that, there is a movie critic in the film, who doles out standard movie cliches that give the characters hints as to what might happen next. That's some shitty screenwriting.

The Law of Character Economy is in full effect as well. Every character essential to the outcome of the movie is introduced in the first two minutes. Every character not shown in these first two minutes is so unnecessary that they may as well not even be in the movie. They're merely filler, because having a massive apartment complex with only seven tenants would be unbelievable. (Not that anything else in this movie is.)

The worst thing about the movie is looking back at the whole thing once it's done. There's two ways this movie could have worked. You could have had Story (clever name, huh) be an escaped mental patient, who believes she's part of a fairy tale, and she and the Paul Giamatti character convince everyone she is who she says she is, only to have it all be made-up in the end. Or, you could have Story come along with her story, and have no one believe her, only to have it all be true in the end. Those stories would work; what Shyamalan has come up with does not. Having all of the characters believe Story's ridiculous tale right from the get-go stretches the realms of believability. It's fine if you want to tell a fairy tale (albeit, a lame one); it worked for The Princess Bride. But to shoehorn a fairy tale intact into a conventional plot, and then have everyone in the plot know it's a fairy tale is the dumbest fucking idea for a movie in history.

And this is where the screenplay shows through the cracks, because the only reason that anyone in the movie does what they do is because It's In The Screenplay. No one else in the world would behave as these people do, because their will is not being controlled by the stupidest screenplay EVER.

Obviously, I can't recommend this movie, not even as a morbid curiosity piece. There's just absolutely nothing in this movie to like: poorly written, poorly directed (which surprised me, because M. Night is usually a good director), poorly acted. Avoid it like poison, and maybe we can put this cocksucker out of business forever.