"Lady in the Water" Has Problems (No Spoilers)

To establish something right up front: I think M. Night Shyamalan is a talented filmmaker.

Visually, his films look great. He has a feel for getting good performances out of his actors. He also has a good feel for bringing little bits of humor to otherwise-serious stories. And each of his movies are rife with solid, well-crafted sequences.

They are also the kind of stories that I like to tell. Ordinary people, trying to deal with a fantasy twist that is thrown at them.

The problem with M. Night is that he is only as good as his screenplays. And as a screenwriter, quite frankly, he's getting worse.

The famous story about M. Night is that it took him 10 drafts of The Sixth Sense to get it right, and it wasn't until the 5th draft that he came up with the twist involving Bruce Willis' character.

Unfortunately, with The Sixth Sense came fame, and with fame came the ability to not need to do ten drafts any more, if he didn't want to. So every movie he does, the scripts just get shakier and shakier.

Unbreakable? Maybe he did 4 drafts. The script held together pretty well, until a third act that didn't go much of anywhere, and one of the worst actual endings I've ever seen.

Signs? Feels like a 3-drafter. Some good bits here (love Joaquin Phoenix freaking out to the bad footage of the alien on TV), but the idea that you need a dying woman to pass along a message that you might want to hit an alien with a baseball bat is really rather eye-rolling.

The Village. A two-drafter, all the way. Potentially-interesting idea, poorly executed story-wise.

Lady In The Water? You guessed it. It feels like a first draft all the way.

It's not giving anything away at all to tell you that M. Night even opens the story up by pretty much telling you where it is going; literally, before we meet any actors, we learn of these humanoid sea creatures, and the knowledge that they need to pass on to people, and that there these wolf creatures want to kill them.

Pretty basic set-up, given to you right up front.

Still, so much early exposition (complete with rudimentary drawings) is an early sign of this script's major, major problem -- M. Night's story here is needlessly overcomplicated.

Not only does he have way too much info that has to be established, but when he does get the lore and the rules laid out, they still don't make much sense.

The whole script just feels incredibly contrived, like he's making it up as he goes along, and it's frustrating as hell, because we want to like this movie.

Paul Giamatti is appealing (as always), the fairy tale feel adds some nice touches, the world of this apartment complex is well-drawn, and there are enough good ideas floating around here to show the solid movie that it could have been. Even M. Night, playing a supporting role, is actually decent as an actor.

(Despite how the commercials are selling this, however, it's not a horror movie. Or much of a thriller. And don't get me started on how incredibly ineffective the evil in this movie is, or the awful deus ex machina ending).

But this has to be one of the worst-executed plots that I've seen in a long time. M. Night seems to realize the problems, too; he works overtime trying to make the exposition entertaining, and tries to have fun with the idea of the characters trying to figure out the "rules" of the fantasy that they have found themselves dropped into.

But the rules don't really make any sense. The story feels slapped together, so much so that we are never satisfied by much of it, because it relies too much on cheats, and on pure contrivance, and on the characters being driven by a fear of creatures that never actually seem to attack much, or with much credible logic.

M. Night also drops in a truly awful subplot involving a character who is a movie critic, who over-analyzes the storyline as the film is going on. All of this reminding of formulaic storytelling just serves to further make one realize how badly manufactured this particular story is.

And I have no idea -- none -- why M. Night felt further inspired to name the female lead "Story".

A recent Entertainment Weekly excerpt (from a book coming out about M. Night's making this movie) details why Disney didn't make this film; Nina Jacobsen had a list of valid complaints about the script, and rather than address the gaping story flaws, M. Night just took it to Warner Brothers, who basically gave him his budget and let him make the movie he wanted to without giving them any of those pesky things called notes.

If you are a filmmaker, that's a dream scenario. Unfortunately, you still have to be able to pull it off. And M. Night simply doesn't. It's frustrating, because again the man has filmmaking skills.

But maybe it's time for him to direct someone else's script next time.