Up until Tuesday night I have been a fan of M. Night Shyamalan’s previous work…heck, everyone and their mother has seen the Sixth Sense…and anyone who says they saw that ending coming is a bold face liar…Sixth Sense was a great movie…a fantastic movie....I loved every moment of it and was extremely excited to see his next film, Unbreakable…while different from Sixth, Unbreakable was still very much the director’s movie…I liked this sophomore effort as well, mainly because it dealt with one of my favorite topics, Super Heroes...putting a new and different spin on it, and again, giving us that patented twist at the end…well, two summers ago, Shyamalan brought us his third film, Signs…not nearly as good as the first two, but still a solid movie…in fact I loved about 90% of the movie…I just totally hated the ending…it was a total War of the Worlds mixed with a jump out of your seat kind of scary…and much like K-Billy, I felt the director sold the film out at the end with it’s cheesy solution to the alien problem and with the final alien beat down by Joaquin Phoenix…but still, after three films, this guy’s track record was pretty good…so heading into the Village, one would have some kind of idea of the type of movie they were expecting…and from the trailers, we could assume that we would be following the same formula in this flick…this time, monsters in the woods, terrorizing a little 1800’s town….

WARNING MAJOR SPOLIERS COMING….

Well, the whole premise is this…there is this small village out in the middle of seemingly nowhere, surrounded on all sides by the big scary forest…and in this village, set in what we deem to be some time in the 1800’s, the “Elders” run things and make sure all is well…meanwhile, the village and the creatures in the woods, or “those we don’t speak about” as they are called, have a deal…the people don’t go in the woods and they don’t come into the village…so essentially, they are cut off from the rest of the world….well, at the start of the movie, we get a few scenes that are to make us feel creeped out or scared of what these beasts may be like…for me, not effective at all…the only time I felt as if the town was truly in danger was when Phoenix’s quiet mysterious character ventures beyond the border and is spotted by one of the creatures…from here, it seems as if the creatures are about to pull off an all out assault on the village...you see this thing shrouded in red running around…and it’s intriguing, but the rest of the story blows some much ass that it made me want so badly to see these supposed monsters ripping the heads of everyone and splashing around in their blood….

I hated the characters in this movie….Phoenix was at his best as the quiet, mysterious Lucius Hunt…but that’s it…the whole love story with Hunt and the two sisters where he and the blind one, Ivy, finally hook just annoyed the crap out of me…and Ivy was the capper…I wanted the beasts to open her up and feed on her entrails….god, soooo annoying…anyway, the story takes a turn when Noah, a mentally challenged boy in the village commits a crime…see, he loves Ivy and has a bit of a hard time dealing with her love for Lucius…so, he stabs the shit out of Lucius, bringing him to the brink of death…the only way to save him is to get medicines from the towns that lie outside the borders of the forest…something Lucius had always wanted to go after but was disallowed by the elders….

And here comes our twist….see, the monsters don’t really exist…they are costumes used by the elders to keep the people in line and out of the forest….but why?...well I’m getting to that…so, they send the blind girl out to get the medicine with two guides, who ultimately leave here to find her own way…now, I am all about the handicapped doing for themselves…but this chick was ridiculous…she found her own way through an entire forest and did not trip once!!!!...and she’s blind….amazing…but I digress…in the woods, we get a moment were we can question if the monsters really are fake or if there is something in the woods…but no, in the end, it was just that mentally challenged boy who escaped, got a costume and tried to kill Ivy…turns out she was able to fend him off too…poor, mentally challenged boy….

As this crap fest plows toward the climax we finally get our big payoff twist…..it seems that the outside world is really the modern world…2004 not 1800’s….seems the elders withdrew from society and built their own little utopia in the middle of some private animal reserve….WOW!!!...by now, this kind of cool idea and concept means nothing to me…I could care less…I just want the shit to end…well, turns out the smart thing to do was send the blind girl after all because when she gets back with the medicine she has no idea what she has seen and thinks that the creatures are real, cause why would an elder attack her in costume…so all is well and this perfect little village can continue…YAY….HOORAY!!!!!... CRAP!!!!!!

I think in short what we have here is a director trying to do too much…he follows his own formula to closely…and now we can all see that it is old and stale…the story is trying too hard to be smart…its trying to hard to catch us off guard….building in the plot around an annoying love story just didn’t work for me…not to mention that I never was truly caught off guard about anything in this film…the so-called twist or surprise at the end was nothing short of disappointing…but most of all this movie has nothing or no one in it for me to give a shit about…I could have cared less for any of the characters or this stupid village…which is even more disappointing because of the cast assembled here…Phoenix, Adrian Brody, Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt among others go to total waste…

I guess what I can only hope for is this will change the now old Shyamalan formula…it just doesn’t work anymore…it too contrived….too forced…I like being led down that path in Sixth Sense to only be smacked in the face at the end…thinking “holy shit, what just happened.”….The Village doesn’t even come within 1,000 miles of that neighborhood…I have tried to think of something, anything I liked about this movie and I got nothing…nothing…and for that, I give it 1 star…worthless….don’t waste your time or money.