Consensus: ‘Lady In The Water’ Is Awful

I must admit, I’m a fairly big M. Night Shyamalan fan. How big? I liked The Village. A lot. Okay, so maybe I don’t have the best taste. But I saw Sixth Sense three times in the theater, I own Unbreakable on DVD, and I even thought Signs was okay. (Remember, it featured a Ukee Washington cameo!)

And, so, as expected, I was fairly excited for Lady in the Water. I mean, c’mon, it was filmed in Bristol. That makes it a must-see (at least for anyone who’s spent any time in Bristol). But, since I’m one of those people who likes to read a good movie review, I figured I’d check out them out before I see the movie. And, uh… uh oh.

PW film critic Sean Burns, who I tend to agree with more often than not, wrote a hilarious, scathing review and gave it a D. Our competitor wasn’t quite as mean, but had a similar reaction.

The Inquirer’s Stephen Rea gave it two stars. The Daily News Gary Thompson gave the film a C. Shyamalan must be disappointed Roger Ebert is recovering for surgery, as the critic surely would have give the film a good review. (He gave Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties three stars.)

Rotten Tomatoes, the film review aggregator, currently has Water ranked at 23 percent. Okay, so it’s higher than Little Man, but there are still reviews to be added into the score. (Water has already dropped two percentage points since I started writing this.)

Of course, critics can be wrong, and you can manage to like movies that every critic hates, but I think Burns’ description of the plot can sort of prove that the consensus is this movie is a train wreck:

Billed as “a bedtime story by M. Night Shyamalan,” the film takes place entirely inside a run-down apartment complex, where Paul Giamatti’s Cleveland Heep (the names in this movie are really something else) is the depressed, stuttering superintendent. There’s a Rainbow Coalition cast of self-consciously “wacky” characters dwelling in their separate units just above the poverty line. And then one day a mermaid shows up in the swimming pool.

Well, not a mermaid per se. She’s a “narf”—some sort of sea nymph who can see into the future, and is visiting here from “the blue world” to help “man get back on the right path.” Played by Bryce Dallas Howard in a joyless Osment-ian whisper, our narf is really more of a wet blanket, quivering in Giamatti’s shower most of the time and gravely intoning ominous prophecies. Oh wait, did I forget to mention her name is “Story”?

Story has been sent to this particular pool so she may serve 
as a muse to a brilliant young writer—a young man so exceptional, with ideas so powerful, an entire generation is going to take his words to heart—and thanks to the fine work of this astounding young genius, our ravaged, war-torn earth will be returned to paradise.

The brilliant young writer is portrayed by M. Night Shyamalan.

And, naturally, there’s a film critic who gets eaten. (The Village, you may remember, was trashed.) You also may remember the Godzilla remake in the mid-1990s, which had a Roger Ebert character as a bumbling mayor.

That means, yes: M. Night Shyamalan is sharing plot points with the Godzilla remake.

God help us all.

Living Night-mare [PW]
Lady in the Water [Rotten Tomatoes]