THE SIXTH SENSE
A Film Review by Brian Takeshita
Rating: *** out of ****
Imagine you are a little kid who could see ghosts. These ghosts torment you day and night, some merely frightening you, others causing real bodily injury. You need help, and who do you want to come to your rescue? Why, Bruce Willis, of course.
Willis plays Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who just received a certificate from the city of Philadelphia for his work. However, not everyone shares the city's benevolent view. One of his former patients, now grown up, breaks into Crowe's house, berates him for not being able to save him from his problems so many years ago, and proceeds to shoot Crowe, then himself. One year later, Crowe is a shadow of his former self, with a flagging marriage and a washed-up career. However, his next assignment is to help young Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), a boy with problems very similar to his failed patient. If Crowe can help little Cole, perhaps he may gain redemption for his earlier mistake.
M. Night Shyamalan's THE SIXTH SENSE starts out on the wrong foot. Crowe and his wife (Olivia Williams) have just gotten home from the awards ceremony and are admiring the certificate's frame. His wife hugs him, looks into his eyes, and then spouts some of the most expository dialog I've heard in a long time. I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like, "You're a successful child psychologist who has pioneered revolutionary techniques in helping children overcome their hidden problems." Whoa, why don't we just have a STAR WARS-like title crawl to fill us in on all the details? Or how about a freeze frame of Crowe, with his description subtitled underneath? It'd be kind of like what they used to do in those Road Runner cartoons: Malcolm Crowe (Genius Childus Helperus). The one saving grace about this scene is it doesn't last very long, since Crowe's old patient shows up and soon puts us out of our misery.
After the shooting and a jump ahead to the following year, it would seem that the film's pace is doggedly slow, taking nearly 40 minutes to get into gear. Out of courtesy to the filmmakers, however, I blame this on the movie's marketing. Every trailer and commercial shows us Cole saying, "I see dead people," and pumps us up for some kind of horror extravaganza, when in reality, it's not until well into the film that Cole confesses his unique ability. All the build-up and precursors would have been effective if we did not know this fact, but as it is, we're just waiting around for over a half an hour, saying to ourselves, "All right, where's the dead people? I wanna see walking corpses, dammit!" Okay, maybe I'm overstating it a bit, but you get the picture.
Luckily, once we start seeing Cole's apparitions, the film picks up a lot of steam and we're taken along for the ride as Crowe must decide whether or not this otherworldly manifestation is merely a product of Cole's imagination, and how he can help the child in any case. This is not to say THE SIXTH SENSE turns into an effects-laden tour de force, however. Instead, our glimpses of the ghosts are separate and isolated, satisfying our curiosity and giving us the occasional scare while not turning the film into just another one of those horror flicks the industry has been churning out so furiously. It is simply evident that writer/director Shyamalan has a good sense of pacing, not allowing us to be overwhelmed with sensory overload. Happily for us, he puts the human story in the forefront, rather than relegating it to the wings as computer generated images take center stage.
When the scares do come, they are wonderfully effective. Some of them catch you totally off guard, while in other cases they are the climax to painfully suspenseful sequences. It's nice to know that the art of frightening is alive and well outside of the slasher movie, and you don't have to rely on guts, blood, gore, or special effects to still scare the heck out of an audience. This film will do quite fine without them, thank you very much. Especially in a season where we've had films like THE HAUNTING, which was 100% effects and constant scares, and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, which was a zero effects production with a film's length of build-up to a two minute payoff, it's refreshing to see a film that makes a compromise between the two extremes and does so with proficiency.
Bruce Willis once again shows us that he's not to be lumped into the same category of those image-only action heroes. When called for, this guy can really act. He takes it a bit over the top at a couple of points, but for the most part he does a fine job garnering our sympathy for his character. Toni Collette as Cole's mother, Lynn, also deserves recognition. Lynn truly loves her son, but must cope with a problem she does not understand. Piling on the pressure is the fact that her husband ran out on her years ago, and she must hold two jobs in order to pay rent and send Cole to a private school. Taking on this role, Collette performs admirably and perhaps only once allows her Australian accent to slip in. However, the real surprise in this film is young Haley Joel Osment. This kid performs with a level of experience beyond his years, able to convey the genuine fear he experiences on a daily basis as well as the suspicious apprehension he feels toward Crowe. By movie's end, this young actor has run the gamut of emotions, all of which are completely convincing.
To be sure, THE SIXTH SENSE has its share of loose ends, but the overall film is still quite solid. Along with the suspense and scares, you also get some really touching moments and even a bit of humor. I won't give away a whole lot, but something happens at the end that will even make you look back on the whole film. And when a movie leaves me thinking about it after I've left the theater, that scores points in my book.
Review posted August 11, 1999
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