The Sixth Sense (1999)
Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette, Olivia Williams; d. M. Night Shyamalan; D+

Ah, to be caught up in the sensation of seeing The Sixth Sense for the first time. The suspense will kill you! The ending will shock you! Brice Willis will amaze you because he's actually not an action hero, AND he's acting subtly! And the adorable yet remarkable Haley Joel Osment will dazzle you with his amazing, precocious talent!

Then, you start to watch it again. And again. And again. And you start to think about it. And then you realize something: This movie isn't very good. Well, at least that's what I realized. While The Sixth Sense may be a notch above the dreary psychological suspense thrillers that come out every year, the wonderment of the film wears off with repeated viewings, revealing flaws along the way. A lot of them, too.

Bruce Willis stars as the solemn-but-wise-cracking supertalented Philedelphia child psychologist Malcom Crowe, who, some undisclosed amount of time after an incident involving an ex-patient (Donnie Walberg) and a gun, decides to take up the case of a lonely young boy named Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment). Cole is a friendless and unpopular child who lives with his single mother (Toni Collette) in a dingy and small appartment. He has unexplanable marks over his body, and seems to be constantly disturbed by something he won't discuss. Malcom automatically assumes Cole is upset over his parents' divorce, but Cole almost immediatley disproves Malcom's theory, leaving Malcom to ponder continuously about Cole's psyche. Meanwhile, we see Cole in several freaky episodes: When Cole's mother leaves the kitchen to put something away, she returns to see all the cabinets opened a la Poltregiest, with Cole sitting stiffly at the table. When asked about the original purpose of the school where he attends, Cole responds that it once was a place where people were hanged. When questioned, Cole commences to accuse his teacher of being a "Stuttering Stanley" and succeeds in having yet another person call him a "freak." What is wrong with Cole? Well, he sees dead people. They are SCARY dead people. They don't know they are dead so they walk around with ugly looking injuries. And they keep bothering Cole. He wants them to go away. Malcom can help, but he can't help save the film.

The trick to The Sixth Sense and M. Night Shyamalan is that they are both all about layers. Shyamalan prefers to layer his films with pretense so that the audience doesn't figure out that he's got nothing to say, at least nothing to say that's substantial or deep. He masquarades his films around as intelligent suspense thrillers by filling them with overdone, pretentious, psuedo-intellectual dialouge ("They don't have meetings about rainbows."), by-the-numbers cheap thrills, stark cinematography, plot twists, and performances that fancy themselves as being good. The Sixth Sense, underneith the layers, is nothing more than an adverage Disney story about a kiddie with special powers who has a special friend who mentors him since this kiddie has no friends. After multiple viewings The Sixth Sense falls flat. The cheap thrills used (person zipping past a room, ghosts with grotesque injuries, a typical "horror" score by James Newton Howard that designates exactly when the audience should jump and be creeped out) fail to excite, the subtle (or not so subtle) clues leading up to the end fail to impress, even raise an eyebrow or two in question, the not very brilliant usage of the colors red and green (which were better used in Vertigo) become apparent, obvious, and henceforth annoying, and characters and performances seem less amazing as they were with the first viewing. Why the hell was this nominated for Best Picture?

The performances in this film aren't anything to write home about. While Haley Joel Osment and Toni Collette are able to rise above the moronic dialouge to deliver the film's two most noteworthy performances, others sink below the matereal. Get past the shock of Bruce Willis playing something other than an action hero and you'll see nothing more than a one-note performance. He does nothing more than mope, occasionally adding in the breif hint of wit in areas where wit was required. Olivia Williams likewise mopes on the camera, never mind that her accent keeps slipping. Everyone else is pointless to bring up.

I'm not going to reccomend this to anyone who wants to see it again. After you've already felt that experience of wonderment and shock you'll never feel it again. The Sixth Sense is like a stick of gum thats flavor is diminished with repeated chewings, it's best to leave well enough alone before the hollowness of Shyamalan rears its ugly face.

© Vert A Go Go Reviews 2001