Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things

A while back there was a Bruce Willis picture called Mercury Rising in which Willis played a tough government agent that doesn't play by the rules, teamed with a little autistic boy with special savant code-cracking abilities. It was pretty lame. When I saw ads for The Sixth Sense, it looked like the same deal rerun with a ghost angle to tap into the fright movie wave of '99.

Boy, was I pleasantly surprised. The Sixth Sense is a thoughtful, well-written and carefully paced piece. It's the first picture by writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, who heretofore has made only small personal pictures related to his life as a young Indian-American. Here he shows he can construct gripping suspense sequences and deliver sharp jolts of terror, while not losing sight of the fact that this is mainly a psychological drama.

Willis plays a successful child psychologist rather than the tough cop you'd expect, and he doesn't team up with the kid to crack a murder case - he's trying to find redemption for what happened to the one kid he didn't help. Little Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), who's apparently having some trouble adjusting after his parents' divorce, reminds Willis very much of the boy his one failure, and he's determined to help the boy to make up for it. It  turns out Cole has a much bigger problem: he can see ghosts. His constant terror of the phantoms that appear all around him are leaving him traumatized, and Willis may be his only hope.

There's something old fashioned about this movie - in a good way. Though there are shocks and scares (the ghosts all appear in the condition they died - pretty gruesome stuff), it doesn't play to exploitation and its story is extremely well crafted. Midway through the film, Willis is attempting to tell Osment a bedtime story, and failing. The boy tells him he has to "throw in some twists". Obviously, Shyamalan has taken his own advice - The Sixth Sense has one of the best twists I've seen in a story in a long time.

While Willis turns in one of those aching, careful performances that marks his better films, it's Osment that steals the show. The young kid only known from the Jeff Foxworthy sitcom cast shows great talent, acting with strength well beyond his years.

Ghosts; bullet in the gut; gore and blood; p-fave Willis.

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The Movie Madness section and its contents are ©2007 Brian Thomas