Teen Review: The Village is Worse Than a Root Canal

There are some slow things in life, like a barge trip down the Nile River in Egypt. There are some painfully slow things, like a root canal. Then there is “The Village,” the newest film from director M. Night Shyamalan.

At least with the first two scenarios, you got something-a beautiful trip or a healthy tooth. This movie was so bad, I was looking forward to the excitement of CSPAN. When the credits rolled, the audience-press and public alike-booed the film.

“The Village” is a disappointing film, especially from Shyamalan, whose other films, “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable,” and “Signs,” have been wonderful. This so-called horror flick takes place in an old-timey little village in the middle of a forest surrounded by monsters called “those-we-do-not-speak-of.” That’s an original name to call the monsters (it took a village to make that up?).

For years, the borders of the town have not been breached. The people do not enter the forest, and the creatures do not enter the town. Then one night, the creatures come into the town and paint red slashes on the doors of the town as a warning. After this occurrence, a teen asks to travel through the forest to the other towns to gather medicines.

That introduction to the story takes up almost half of the 108-minute movie. To tell you the rest is a chain reaction that would give away the plot altogether-the very slow, predictable plot.

This is such a bad movie. The plot is slow, the characters aren’t really that interesting, and the acting by Adrien Brody and Sigourney Weaver was like a Saturday Night Live sketch in which they were trying to act like bad actors.

And the scares were not really scary, they just played a boom over the soundtrack all of a sudden, and that made people jump. That’s it.

But the worst thing was the twist ending, or lack thereof. Many of Shyamalan’s movies have endings that are surprising and unexpected. This ending really wasn’t that much of a stretch on the plot, thus no twist.

Rated “PG-13” for a “scene of violence and frightening images,” “The Village was written, directed and produced by Shyamalan, and starring Bryce Dallas Howard and Joaquin Phoenix. I give this movie a 0 out of 5.