Boring ‘Village’ Shyamalan’s weakest effort yet

In theaters

THE VILLAGE, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, 120 minutes, rated PG-13.

Forget the dead people. The new M. Night Shyamalan film, “The Village,” sees trees. Lots of trees. The director can’t stop filming them, racing through them, or watching them sway in the breeze.

He’s so fascinated by them, sometimes he’s even in the trees, shooting his characters from a high perch while they work through their haunting little melodramas down below.

Curiously, in spite of all this arbor, the film never goes out on a limb.

As written, produced and directed by Shyamalan, “The Village” is the director’s weakest, most sterile effort to date, a silly, predictable plunge into the forest whose script should have been clear-cut by a more talented writer before it went into production.

Like his last film, “Signs,” and 2000’s “Unbreakable,” “The Village” is damned by a plot that falls apart in ways that his exemplary “The Sixth Sense” didn’t.

Since so much of it hinges on key elements that can’t be revealed here, the bare-bones version goes like this: Set in what appears to be 19th century rural Pennsylvania, a small community fears what lurks beyond the forest that circles their land.

Known by the villagers as Those We Do Not Speak Of, these unseen, snorting beasts form a physical and emotional barrier that most dare not cross.

The village elders (William Hurt, Brendan Gleeson, Sigourney Weaver among them) are steadfast in their refusal to allow anyone to leave the village and go into the woods. Naturally, some of the younger villagers are tempted – particularly Noah Percy (Adrien Brody). All of this leads to a chain of events that finds the blind Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) racing through the woods in an effort to find medicine for her ailing intended, Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix).

In her yellow, hooded cloak, Ivy rides a rail of faith as she speeds toward a town she does not know and cannot see. Following her is The One That Causes Audience Laughter, a bizarre cross between a boar, a porcupine and a wolf, who is remarkably decked out in a red cape.

As we’ve come to expect, everything in a Shyamalan film builds to what the director hopes will be the big gasp, the defining moment when audiences discover that all isn’t what they were led to believe. That’s just the case in “The Village.”

Still, five years out from “Sense,” it’s all become a bit boring and repetitive, as if Shyamalan can’t stop banging that same metal pot of his. Through his reputation and his films’ revealing marketing campaigns, he has trained audiences to go into his movies not only expecting a twist, but seeking it.

Hitchcock was a master of this, but Shyamalan is an amateur. By treading that same territory time and again, he has stolen his own thunder, with his movies unable to support the hype.

At some point, one would hope with his next film, this promising director will break free from all the trappings that bind him and, just to clear his head, try something different-perhaps a comedy or a romance. Sometimes, one has to get away from The Thing That One Knows in order to rediscover why The Thing That Once Worked worked so well.

Grade: D+

On video and DVD

THE WHOLE TEN YARDS, directed by Howard Deutch, written by Mitchell Kapner and George Gallo, 99 minutes, rated PG-13.

So far this year, worst movie honors go to Howard Deutch’s “The Whole Ten Yards,” a lazy, dumb, irrelevant sequel to 2000’s “The Whole Nine Yards,” which was good for what it was. It took a tired genre, the hit-man comedy, and manufactured from it a funny farce, something that’s hardly the case here.

As directed by Deutch from a screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and George Gallo, “The Whole Ten Yards” gathers together most of its predecessor’s cast and puts out a contract on their careers.

The story is strictly business as usual, with former hit man Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski (Bruce Willis) now living in Mexico with his chickens, his denial, his bunny slippers, his mullet and Jill (Amanda Peet), who has become an emotionally unbalanced hit woman unable to score a direct hit.

One of the gags is that Jimmy has become a house husband, the Martha Stewart of the Mafia set. Another gag is that in spite of shooting so much weaponry in his youth, he can’t seem to get Jill pregnant because he is shooting blanks, so to speak. Isn’t that hilarious? That’s the film at its best, folks.

Also unfunny is Matthew Perry’s overbearing pratfalls as Oz, the Montreal dentist who gets mixed up again with Jimmy and Jill after a Hungarian gangster named Lazlo Gogolak (Kevin Pollack) kidnaps Oz’s wife, Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge), so he can get to Jimmy through Oz.

That sounds like a setup for a relatively straightforward plot, but the execution is so frenzied and muddled – and so sloppily edited – that Perry’s character speaks volumes when he starts exclaiming about how confused he is by how everything turns out. Trust me on this: We feel his pain.

Grade: F

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, 5:30 p.m. Thursdays on WLBZ 2 Bangor and WCSH 6 Portland, and are archived at Rotten

Tomatoes.com. He may be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.