Old - Movie Review

Critics Score - 6 of 10

General Audience Score - 6 of 10

M. Night Shyamalan broke onto the scene in 1999 with his feature film The Sixth Sense and quickly became the heralded “Hitchcock” of our generation after he followed that up with Unbreakable, Signs and The Village. But after it became clear that M. Night was perfectly capable of directing some, let’s just politely say not great films, and that The Sixth Sense was about the best of what he had to offer, he’s struggled to return to form and his films of late have been met with mixed results. Old is his latest attempt to recapture some of his former greatness and it follows his typical pattern of starting out with an intriguing premise with potential to be a fun mystery with a great twist ending. But the execution and the final plot twist just don’t stick the landing like his movies used to. This film is still relatively high in overall entertainment value, even at an hour and forty-five minutes, but most of M. Night’s tricks are getting, well, Old.

SYNOPSIS - This secluded beach vacation kicks off with a family pulling up to a glamorous resort that the mother, Prisca (Vicky Krieps), has booked for her and her husband Guy (Gael García Bernal), and their two kids. They check out the hotel, Prisca and Guy have an argument but instead of focusing on setting a creepy mood and mysterious tone for the film, we jump right into them waking up and heading to a beach that the hotel has arranged for them to go to. This is where the screenwriting really begins to suffer for a lack of originality and hangs it’s hat on the premise doing most of the films’ heavy lifting. The family gets out on a secluded beach with another couple, Charles (Rufus Sewell) and Chrystal (Abbey Lee), along with their daughter and Charles elderly mother. Within a little while things are going awry, the dog has died and the kids are hitting puberty, but there’s nothing surprising here as we’ve discerned the general movie concept that comprises most of what is happening from literally anything we’ve seen or heard about the film. Soon these two families are joined by some others and everyone begins to work to uncover the mystery of this beach, but the predictability of things that will happen rises and the film’s ability to take a fascinating premise in interesting directions deteriorates like our patience with the movie.

By the time everyone is *spoiler alert* Old, we’ve been given a tutorial on how to take a great movie concept and execute it almost as weakly as possible. The acting is mediocre to poor, even with a fairly decent cast capable of perfectly good work, it seems as if the screenplay and direction just didn’t give this group enough to work with. The tone of the film also steers clear of the rest of M. Night’s filmography in the borderline horror genre and stays almost exclusively on a beach in broad daylight where jump scares and a creepy mood just weren’t cultivated to kick this film’s suspense up a notch. Some of the cinematography is also pretty weak and head scratching as if they tried to save a few bucks and had some of the actors film some shots while they weren’t on screen. All in all this film is riding on the M. Night Shyamalan name and reputation for delivering a twist ending, which unfortunately Old ranks among his most poorly executed and unshocking finales.

SUMMARY - While this movie can be quite amusing and even provide a couple laughs, it fails to deliver any of the high quality elements that made some of M. Night’s previous film’s with fantastic premises truly brilliant. The predictability of the plot and anti-climactic ending leave us feeling like this film is just more of the same old, same Old.