Friday, July 23, 2021

Movie Review: Old

In my opinion, the most unusual writer/producer/director career in the history of Hollywood belongs to M. Night Shyamalan.

Shyamalan’s first movie was the “The 6th Sense”, released in 1999. The 6th Sense was a monster hit, with one of the best screenplays and arguably the best ending of any movie ever made. Since then, Shyamalan has been trying to get back to the heights he reached 22 years ago. In 2000 “Unbreakable” was released and I thought this was a very good but not great movie. Another honorable mention was “Devil”, released in 2010 and Split, released in 2016. But these two movies were just good films nowhere near the level of The 6th Sense.

After Unbreakable, Shyamalan has written and directed mostly average movies, with the exception of “The Lady in the Water”, and “After Earth” that were both regarded as bad productions. Unfortunately Shyamalan's new movie “Old” is once again another average movie. It is easy to understand that due to Shyamalan’s extreme dedication to the craft of movie making and the time it takes him to write, produce, direct and then release a new film – that movie making is one hell of a challenging industry to dedicate your life to. I personally have heard stories of Shyamalan even mortgaging his own home to get the funding to produce a new movie. Despite enormous amounts of work, script rewrites, production problems, there is never any guarantee that any movie will be great or even make money.

After spending years writing, producing and directing and finally releasing Old, I can only imagine how disappointed Shyamalan is now after seeing the relatively poor 50% scores on Rotten Tomatoes and 6.2 score on IMDB. I would rank Old in the low 70% range because it is not a bad movie, just not good enough to be something that will be respected and remembered for a long time. The premise of Old is, “Several people are vacationing on an Island, where they wind up on an ocean cove surrounded by rocks that they not only cannot escape from, but also makes them age extremely fast”. Granted this is a new and very unique idea, but unfortunately watching people age, die and try and escape their confined Island cove, became old as fast as the people were aging.

There is a pretty good and surprising ending, that Shyamalan always tries to put in all of his movies, but not enough to save this film. Once again, Shyamalan himself, just like Alfred Hitchcock did in many of his movies, appears in this film as a van driver.

Finally, I give Old a marginal recommendation, mostly for die hard fans of M. Night Shyamalan.

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