Lady in the Water (PG-13-2006)

Despite all of the negative hype and the Razzie Awards associated with this movie, I really wanted to like it. That negative press kept me from watching it this long, but with Paul Giamatti and M. Night Shyamalan involved, I just had to give it a chance. Well, I should have believed the hype. While it was not nearly as horrible as I had heard, I did find it to be slow and sort of uninteresting for a "fairy tale". Giamatti plays a superintendent for an apartment complex who finds a mysterious woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) in the complex's swimming pool. As it turns out, she is a "water person", a people who live in the water and never seem to have any contact with "land people" any more. For her to survive, he must find a way to return her to her native land and, for some reason, it is not as simple as bringing her to a body of water and dropping her in. The steps he must take are so convoluted and so mysterious that you just stop trying to follow them. One of the major issues with this film is that Shyamalan is somehow convinced that whispering equals drama. As in "The Village", so many of the scenes involve characters whispering to a point where you can not even understand what they are saying. Giamatti is as good as you would expect him to be, but the material does not make this one of the performances you would mind missing. Somehow, Shyamalan found a way to take an interesting, fantastical concept and keep it from being even remotely interesting.

Grade: D-

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