Even great directors sometimes make bad movies. The worst seem to come from those who aspire to greatness without really possessing the intellectual capacity to get anywhere near.
M Night Shyamalan is one of these: talented but inclined towards the portentous. This film is bad enough to cause his detractors to crow and his fans to doubt him.
Apart from telling a story that is as silly as it is pretentious, the film commits two cardinal sins.
The first is to make the usually excellent Paul Giamatti look like an ordinary actor; the second is to achieve the almost impossible feat of making ace cinematographer Chris Doyle seem pedestrian.
Giamatti, looking more and more hangdog as the film progresses, plays Cleveland Heep, the superintendent of an apartment block who falls into the pool, appears to drown and then wakes up in his room with a half- clothed Bryce Dallas Howard.
Her name is Story and she's a naiad from the Blue World, come to save him from the foolishness of humanity.
She is pursued by a nasty wolflike creature called a scrunt and there's an eagle that flies overhead which looks pretty threatening, too.
Also in the apartment block is a writer (M Night, himself), a good-time Asian girl with a granny who knows about ancient fairytales, and a prissy film critic (Bob Balaban) who gets scrunched by the scrunt.
This character particularly worried Disney, which was originally going to make the film and thought he would automatically generate unkind reviews.
Disney eventually passed the movie over to Warner Brothers, which cannot have been pleased with the reviews on its American release.
It is almost impossible to like Lady in the Water, despite the basic efficiency of its making and the smoothness of its production design. Not only does it not add up but, even if it did, one imagines it would be no great shakes at all.
Lady In The Water
Cert: PG
