Why I Hate... M. Night Shyamalan

With the release of his latest movie Lady In The Water on DVD, our generation's sub-Hitchcock is once again generating column inches. Critics have not been kind - "boring" say some, "career-threateningly catastrophic" says another - but I don't need to see it to know that it's a sickly sweet tale of morality about man and the supernatural, with a surprise shock ending. Again.

Let's be honest, back in the day, Night was good at what he did - whether or not you foresaw the end of The Sixth Sense, you can't deny it was an effective little thriller. Night managed to flog his one-trick pony the second time around with Unbreakable - moderately enjoyable despite its glacial pacing - but these days, it deserves to be taken out to the knackers yard. Shyamalan has painted himself into a corner in his career, and no amount of trick editing and CGI monsters can get him out of that. The 'shock' endings which Night appears to have trademarked have become downright lame: surely it makes sense to think that, if aliens can master spacecraft technology and travel brazillians of miles to planet Earth, they can also open Mel Gibson's front door? "People of Earth! We have come to enslave you! Just as long as you don't have any alien technology which allows you to become safely enclosed in an indoor environment! Or any water! Prepare to be invaded effortlessly!" Where's your common sense, M. Night Charlatan? These are plot holes so big you can construct a series of luxury apartments in them.

Aside from the plot limitations of Night's self-penned, self-obsessed work, his film-making style is equally bereft of spark. Plot points, imagery and hints are all rammed repeatedly home until the viewer is in no doubt that it means Something Important. And, at the end, when M. Night flashes his trademark Big Reveal, it's the arrogant conceit of someone who enjoys the fact he's using his directorial ability to hoodwink the punters. Us humble viewers, meanwhile, watch the movies and second guess the plots to such an extent that when the actual 'twist' is employed, it's far less outlandish than what we had in mind. By the time I was halfway through The Village, I was expecting the monsters to be witchcraft-resurrected cannibals of dead villagers and the village itself to be the nightmarish hallucination of a man in a mental hospital undergoing a lobotomy inside a parallel universe where our actual 'reality' is controlled by aliens who use human beings as a battery source. Starring M. Night Shyamalan as the Alien God in human form.

That last point of course is entirely possible - like Hitchcock before him, Night insists on appearing in all of his movies, but where old Alfred lumbered harmlessly past in the background, Night's 'cameo' roles have grown bigger and bigger. Case in point: Night has cast himself in Lady In The Water as a writer whose works will become more important than The Bible in 500 years time. Vain much? Future M. Night Shyamalan productions will presumably see the man himself playing the Son of God (only Night's Jesus can fly, shoot lightning bolts out of his fingertips and goes out with Bryce Dallas Howard) and the sequel to Being John Malkovich, called... well, you get the idea.

The man's ego far outstrips his slender talent. When The Village came out, he was responsible for a flatulent and ponderous documentary about his former life entitled 'The Buried Secret Of M. Night Shyamalan', which was in fact, nothing but invention. According to the doc, Night saw Something Dreadful When He Was Young That He May Or May Not Have Been Implicated In And Won't Talk About But Never Actually Happened. The 'documentary' sees Night play hide-and-seek and bait-and-switch with a camera crew, all powered by his own gigantic sense of self-satisfaction (think a made-for-TV version of The Blair Witch Project and you're not far off). In the end, Night comes across as some kind of post-modern joke: pretending to be a talented director to hoodwink Hollywood. All sleight of hand, you see: it certainly didn't stop everyone from realising the Village sucked. It made me ashamed to wear yellow.

Around about the same time as the cinematic release of Lady In The Water, an accompanying book release named 'The Man Who Heard Voices: Or How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career On A Fairytale' hit shelves. Allegedly ghost-written by Night himself (some sections take the form of inner personal monologues which would obviously unbeknown to the 'author'), it reveals that he is a frustrated visionary stifled by bean counters and egotists, or, conversely, an insufferably arrogant and unoriginal man who thinks his every word is Pure Genius and is in denial of the facts. Anyone can be a genius, but it doesn't mean anyone IS a genius. One passage, in which Night is confronted by a young actress, is likened to "Moses before the burning bush." Spare me.

So what is the truth about M. Night Shyamalan? Well Night, if you're reading - and to be frank, sir, you seem like the kind of chap who Googles himself incessantly - you've boxed yourself in a corner, where the law of diminishing returns dictates that soon the only person appearing in, and watching your movies, will be yourself. If there is a twist ending to your tale, it's probably not as good as the one we've got in mind.