The big surprise of M. Night Shyamalan's followup to The Village is that there is no big surprise at the end of it. It is instead a ritualistic playing-out of a prophecy -- a whole-cloth mythology -- and the only trick to it is to figure out who among the residents of The Cove apartment complex in suburban Philadelphia (where else?) plays what part in the prophecy: a Narf, a sea nymph from The Blue World, will require the assistance of a Writer, a Guardian, a Healer, a Symbolist, and a Guild, if she is successfully to evade the Scrunt, a growling canine creature with grass hair, and be airlifted back to The Blue World by a giant eagle known as The Great Eatlon. Among many miscalculations, the most grievous is Shyamalan's casting of himself in the role of the sought-after Writer -- a/k/a The Chosen One -- whose magnum opus, entitled The Cookbook, is earmarked to inspire a Great Leader who will set the misguided world back on course. (Cue, over the closing credits, a hesitant, unconfident, but hopeful rendition of Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'," by a group named A Whisper in the Noise.) The messianic tendency has become more and more pronounced in the filmmaker's oeuvre, ever since the outsized success of The Sixth Sense gave him leave, gave him license. But it has never before achieved such a height of public embarrassment. For entertainment purposes, that's not altogether a bad thing. There's a horrible sort of fascination in the spectacle, balanced by a quite pleasurable fascination in the photography of Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's right hand), the camera hovering around the faces at odd angles and with odd framings. If you're going to make a right bloody fool of yourself, you might as well make yourself a good-looking fool. With Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bob Balaban, Sarita Choudhury. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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