I am constantly amazed by the movies of M. Night Shyamalan. Not because of their vision or effectiveness, but by the fact that people still give him money to make pictures. Sure, The Sixth Sense, 22 years ago, was a pretty cool movie and a game-changer. But his movies since then (Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water) have become increasingly hard to swallow, even for the sci-fi/horror genre.
Now we have Old, in which a variety of one-dimensional vacationers (Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell and others) on an exclusive, secluded beach begin to age rapidly, reducing their lifetimes to a single day. As they struggle to learn why this is happening, the audience struggles to care. In all fairness, this non-thriller did succeed in making me an hour and 48 minutes older.
The cop-out conclusion/explanation is facile, messy and pointless. M. Night has never realized that merely trying to do something different is in itself not enough. Might have worked as a single Twilight Zone episode. (108 min)
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