By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to M. Night Shyamalan’s box office busting 1999 suspense thriller The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osment, Toni Collette, and Donnie Wahlberg.
Is it really necessary to precede any mention of a film’s story with a spoiler alert, regardless of when the movie was released? I don’t think so either. Bruce Willis is a ghost in The Sixth Sense. There, I said it.
If you didn’t know the twist and are now upset with me, I have three things to say to you. (1) You’re on the best movie website in the world and you’ve not seen The Sixth Sense? Sort it out! (2) You’ve clearly been spoiled by too many spoiler alerts! (3) I couldn’t care less.
The Sixth Sense is a film entirely carried by one split second moment towards the end when the audience realises that Bruce Willis is actually a dead man. The other 107 minutes are merely a tedious preamble and, as with many so called “classic” movies, this would have worked far better as a short film. Be honest – have you ever gone back over the film, knowing what you now know? I didn’t think so. Well, for the purposes of this column, I did, and it wasn’t pretty. Everything falls a little too neatly into place, and the parts that made you think that Bruce Willis was actually alive in the first place are wafer thin when it comes to credibility.
And what’s with the excessive symbolic use of the colour red? Red sweater, red tent, red balloon, red doorknob. It turns out that they were coloured that way by director M. Night Shyamalan in an unsuccessful attempt to be clever. This symbolic device isn’t original, however, and it doesn’t have the subtlety that the film screams out for. With hindsight, it’s clearly nothing more than pretentious. These are just, “Ooh look…aren’t I clever” distractions placed by the “genius” director who also gave us such stinkers as, well, every other film he’s ever made.
The Sixth Sense is hailed by many as the greatest cinematic suspense film of modern times, but it doesn’t have enough to offer to make people want to return to it again and again. And for that reason, I believe that, at best, it deserves to be hailed only as the greatest cinematic wet turd of modern times. Oh, what was that? You think that I’m being unfair? *SPOILER ALERT* You’re a clueless tosser!
