Old: New Tricks Can't Save a Dumb Dog

Between Trap and now Old, I believe I'm getting a sense of the general critical reputation that M. Night Shyamalan possesses. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I perceive that Shyamalan is undeniably creative, but a bit narratively challenged. His ideas are wonderful, but his execution would typically be better off in the hands of a different writer or even a different director. I felt this way after Trap, and once again, that exact feeling is back, the feeling that I knew I liked the movie I'd just seen, but that the flaws in it were big enough to drive a South Dakota-Class battleship through. Don't get me wrong here. Old is a fresh and unique movie that's not without its merits, but Shyamalan's execution of his wild ideas is at best uneven and at worst severely wanting. You could say that if viewing flaws in a movie aged me, I'd be a very elderly man by the end of Old.

Now, the movie isn't a total loss. This is probably a given for you because of the Shyamalan name, but I was impressed at how utterly unique the concept of Old is. An inescapable beach that inexplicably ages anyone on it is a pretty terrifying notion, and whatever you think of Shyamalan as a filmmaker, you'll always get to experience something you haven't experienced before when you watch his movies, and that's nothing if not a noteworthy directorial trait. His ideas are given a gorgeous backdrop to work with as well, as the location scouts for the movie very obviously did their homework. Playa El Valle is a gorgeous and unique beach that I definitely didn't have to google to find the name for, and it makes for a setting that's more than a little breathtaking and beautifully contrasted by the sinister edge that the caves around the beach possess.

But even flattered by the undeniable beauty of its setting, Old suffers from an oversaturation of characters and doesn't do itself any favors with a cast that's more than a little bit too large for its premise. It was hard for me to grow attached to any of the characters in Old because the movie didn't seem to care about them as much as it cared about its ideas. As the characters in the movie began to age and even die, I was really cold to their fates because the movie never gave me a reason to think or feel otherwise, which is really disappointing given the fact that this movie's setting is really contained and relatively resistant to obvious spectacle.

But on a somewhat more tangible level, a lot of the handheld camera work in this movie is intriguing, adding a sense of disorientation to the whole experience. The aging makeup work on the actors is also remarkable, managing to look completely natural without ever being overdone. Some of the setpieces featured are really effective while also making a lot of sense for the setting of the movie in ways that will make you go my goodness, these people really are getting older. A couple of highlights include a scene where one character becomes pregnant and gives birth virtually instantaneously, and another where someone with a previously benign tumor needs to get it cut out when it suddenly and rapidly becomes cancerous.

But for as creative as some of these scenes are, they unfortunately tend to act as detours, detracting from the movie's overall momentum instead of contributing to the story in any meaningful way. Old gets too caught up in the ins and outs of its premise, and with time it devolves into a whole lot of ideas without a whole lot of movie to go with them. Now, I do like how impossible-to-beat the whole scenario feels. I legitimately was at a loss to predict how our characters would get off the beach, and constantly wondering what was going to happen next, even if the movie did have some one-trick-pony tendencies where someone would offer a solution to the problem, the group would try it, something terrible will happen to the person who suggested this latest strategy, and then they would rinse and repeat. I also wasn't keen on the climax and its lazy third-act revelations. They're inexplicably out of left field, and too shocking to warrant a lack of any real build-up to them. Old might create some intriguing dilemmas, but it wasn't exactly adept when it came to solving them.

Old seems to fall very much into the same boat as Shyamalan's more recent Trap. Its premise is fresh, but its execution is extremely lacking. I appreciate Shyamalan as one of the increasingly rare directors who can craft entirely unique visions in a world run by franchises, but I did wish that his movies were a little bit, you know, better. Old is too dead-set on its premise and misses its marks with some poorly conceived and poorly executed storytelling fundamentals. Its plotting is a stop-and-start mess, and its cast of characters much too large. The ideas at play here are wonderful, but the way this movie gets these ideas across is clumsy and full of long stretches where the movie just seems to freeze narratively for no apparent reason. Old is also like a broken record, returning over and over again to the same plot points when it would have been better off trying something new. For as fun as its premise is, you could say that this movie gets old fast.

Old - 5/10

Psalm 71:18