Time to play our favorite M. Night Shyamalan game: Which Night are we gonna get? The one with assured direction, thoughtful dialog, and inventive stories? Or the one with tin-eared dialog, inexplicably bad acting, and a ham-fisted story? I mean… you pays yer dues, you takes yer chances… and this time, we get the “did a robot rise this script” version. Oh joy.

Old is about a group of tourists who are invited to an exclusive beach surrounded by high walls and accessible only through a narrow gap. On the beach, they realize they are all aging quickly and it’s a matter of time before they all die from their illnesses, each other, or old age.

Hey, it’s a perfectly good Twilight Zone-y type premise. What could go wrong? Well, we could start with dialog written by an AI that doesn’t understand what humans sound like. We could move onto dubious acting from miscast actors… maybe they are good but this is the M. Night who doesn’t know how to get a good performance out of someone or know how to say “Cut. Let’s try it again.” (I’m looking at you Mark “Doesn’t anybody care about the bees” Wahlberg). Maybe it’s the fact nobody acts like a real human being and we skip abruptly and awkwardly from scene to disconnected scene? Or the over-explaining ending with someone saying “as you all know”… No, I don’t know. Why don’t you explain it to me, Captain Exposition.

It’s like M. Night has gone back to not understanding how humans OR movies work. I’m constantly perplexed by this man’s ups and downs. How the same dude who made The 6th Sense and Signs could also give birth to the malformed and abused Last Airbender movie. Hell, I’m not a fan of The Happening or The Lady in the Water but at least I can peek under the curtain and see the bones of a well-shot movie. Not so here.

I guess, to be fair, this is actually overall a better movie than those last two Shyamalan movies I mentioned. Not by much… but at least it’s less boring and has a more coherent, straight-forward narrative. And you can still see some attempts at creative camera work and editing.

So there ya go. Once again we rolled badly and got the hack. This one wasn’t written or directed by him… pretty sure it was written and directed by his evil robot doppelganger. Maybe he should make that movie next.

Score: 67