Old — Review Thread

This movie is nutsack.

Too late.  Fred Willard taught Sno everything he knows.

My guess is that a pitcher is a sack and it's full of what someone left when they nutted in it.

But maybe I'm the perverted one, it could mean something else. You never know with NE.

I'm disappointed the reviews have just been middling on this. From the trailer I thought we might have another The Happening on our hands.

He’s only saying that to bait 1godzillafan

C+ CinemaScore


The Sixth Sense: A-
Unbreakable: C
Signs: B
The Village: C
Lady in the Water: B-
The Happening: D
The Last Airbender: C
After Earth: B
The Visit: B-
Split: B+
Glass: B

Old(7/24/2021)
Believe me, no one wanted to see M. Night Shyamalan succeed more than me. The dude emerged as a major filmmaker right when I was first getting into film and I believed the hype when Newsweek mused that he may be “the next Spielberg.” But then The Village disappointed, Lady in the Water baffled, and The Happening bewildered. I didn’t stick around for such indignities as his The Last Airbender or After Earth but I was a bit surprised when the public seemed to give him a second chance in the last few years. Split was a surprise hit and its follow-up Glass was considered something of a major release… which surprises me because these movies, while indeed an improvements over some of the guy’s low points, still had a lot of the same oddness and miscalculations of Shyamalan’s failures. Then when I saw the trailer to his new movie Old I must say I groaned a little. The film, which envisions a hidden beach on an island resort that traps people and makes them suddenly age rapidly, was a premise that seemed inherently off-putting to me and the thought of Shyamalan specifically directing these adult actors to act like children seemed to have the potential for unintentional comedy. I was bracing for this to be a disaster of The Happening proportions, but when reviews came in they were… mixed, and there was talk about there being some kind of wacky ending and at a certain point I just needed to see this thing for myself.

This is being advertised as a horror movie but it’s not really trying to be “scary” so much as it’s trying to riff on the existential fear of aging and bodily decay, which isn’t an inherently terrible idea but its execution here is lacking. The film offers basically no explanation for the aging phenomenon here beyond “it’s magic,” which is fine but its reasons for why tourists are showing up on this beach are kind of crazy and don’t really hold up to even the slightest scrutiny. Additionally I think Shyamalan kind of misunderstands the kind of movie that this premise invites. This rapid aging idea would seem to be one that would lend itself to a wildly transgressive work of body horror that would revel in the gore of bodily decay but Shyamalan instead tries to turn it into something of a mass market PG-13 movie that shies away from some of the crazier aspects of the premise. The camera needs to shy away from things like an impromptu tumor surgery or a rapid body decay and there’s something that transpires between two of the child turned adult characters that is absolutely insane but which the movie basically glosses past instead of lingering on the ramifications. Speaking of those child turned adult characters, the movie basically sidesteps a lot of the implications of that, the performances weren’t as painful as I was expecting but that’s partly because they just kind of stop acting like children at a certain point as if maturity is primarily rooted in brain development rather than life experience. Beyond that, while this is nothing as embarrassing as The Happening there are still off-putting Shyamalanisms here like odd character traits and botched line readings. I will give it this, I was never really bored watching the movie and the scenery was certainly nice, but whatever opportunity was there for something really memorable was not achieved.
** out of Five

I'm not gonna defend every choice made.