M. Night Shyamalan, the master of supernatural subject matter and twist endings, is one of the most famous directors working today. Whether they love his movies or hate them (or are simply indifferent to them, although that’s rare), everyone has heard of him. They go to his movies for the twist, and if they’re good, they stay for the memorable characters and the intriguing plot and the permeating sense of terror.
His career started off strong and then fell into a slump before he came back with a vengeance, so his scores on Rotten Tomatoes are all over the chart, with some surprisingly high and others shockingly low. So, here are M. Night Shyamalan’s Movies, Ranked By Rotten Tomatoes Score.
The Last Airbender (5%)
It’s hardly a surprise that this is on the bottom – in fact, the only surprise is that it has a higher score than 0%. The Last Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan’s live-action film adaptation of the far superior Avatar animated series, is not just considered by critics to be a bad movie; it is considered to be one of the worst movies ever made.
It “won” the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture along with four other Razzies, and deservingly so. The acting, the writing, the plotting, the visual effects – Shyamalan got everything wrong. From diehard fans of the source material to passive moviegoers, hardly a single viewer left the film satisfied.
After Earth (11%)
After Earth is a shameful exercise in nepotism. Set in a distant future, Will and Jaden Smith play two humans who crash-land on an Earth that has been taken over by animals that have evolved to ravenously destroy humans (it’s not exactly informed by science).
With the elder Smith injured in the wreckage, the younger one becomes the star of the film and that’s where the problems begin. He was cute in The Pursuit of Happyness as a young kid, but as a teenager, it instantly becomes apparent that he hasn’t inherited his father’s acting talents. One could call After Earth a disappointment, but were expectations for it that high to begin with?
The Happening (18%)
The first act of The Happening sets up a terrifying virus movie. An unexplained phenomena starts causing people to commit suicide, so construction workers all jump off scaffolding in tandem and streets full of cars start crashing into one another. However, developing a plot from this in the second act is where the screenplay begins to stumble, and Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, while great actors in their own right, are terribly mismatched.
Then, in the third act, the movie devolves into a disaster as it’s revealed that vengeful trees are to blame for the viral outbreak, and the heroes survive it because the virus simply dissipates in the time between their decision to sacrifice themselves and actually stepping outside.
Lady in the Water (25%)
This score is unsurprising, since Lady in the Water sucks. It’s about a landlord who discovers a woman in the swimming pool of his building. She turns out to be a Narf, a water nymph, who is threatened by a Scrunt, a menacing wolf-like creature. A Narf versus a Scrunt – oh, boy.
It might sound like Shyamalan had a deadline for a new script, so he just hashed out the most random and spontaneous plot he could think of, but this was actually a passion project for the director. He even gave himself a major acting role in the supporting cast. The movie has a terrible premise, a slow pace, and an inconsistent internal mythos, so it was pretty much doomed from the word “go.”
Glass (38%)
Any superhero movie in 2019 that has no association with Thanos’ jaw-dropping finger-snap faces the possibility of falling by the wayside or being considered one superhero movie too many. Movie buffs were all for Glass, but it just wasn’t a great movie. After all these years of waiting for an Unbreakable sequel, fans were disappointed to see it essentially get crammed into a more studio-friendly Split sequel.
James McAvoy was as brilliant as ever in his return to the role (or, rather, roles) of “the Horde,” but he didn’t quite fit into the tight, tense dynamic established by Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson (two actors with a past and, along with that, palpable chemistry) in the first Unbreakable movie. Instead, he feels shoehorned in following the success of Split. The trilogy doesn’t feel like a trilogy; it feels like a patchwork, and its conclusion feels forced.
Wide Awake (40%)
What a lot of movie buffs don’t realize is that M. Night Shyamalan directed a movie before The Sixth Sense called Wide Awake. It wasn’t a supernatural horror movie and it didn’t end with a plot twist – it was a harmless comedy starring Denis Leary that Shyamalan hoped would make audiences cry as well as laugh.
Unfortunately, it fell a little short of that and didn’t really make audiences do either. The critics weren’t impressed by this tale of a ten-year-old’s search for God following the death of his grandfather, but it was a mild box office success, grossing around $20 million against a $6 million budget.
The Village (44%)
This one is let down massively by its dreadful closing twist, the reveal that the movie isn’t really set in the past and has actually taken place in the present day the whole time, with the village’s apparent elders cordoning off an area of woods and dressing up as monsters to keep the residents from leaving, all in a half-assed attempt to maintain old-timey values and block out modern technology.
Until that twist, the movie is a dark and disturbing and spooky historical horror movie, but after the big reveal, it just leaves a bad taste in the audience’s mouth, which is a shame, because if Shyamalan didn’t have a pathological urge to throw in a twist, he could’ve had a neat little scary movie on his hands.
The Visit (67%)
The Visit wasn’t a perfect movie, but it was a welcome return to form for M. Night Shyamalan. It was the director’s best film in years and gave his career a much-needed comeback after helming a double whammy of two of the worst movies of all time. It didn’t add much to the crowded found footage horror subgenre, but it was a tense and unnerving cinematic ride.
The film’s sly sense of humor was delightfully unexpected and, for the first time in Shyamalan’s career, the twist actually added something to the movie. Rather than ruin it, the twist ending gives you a reason to go back and watch the movie again, looking for all the chilling clues.
Unbreakable (70%)
Shyamalan’s take on the superhero genre feels like a breath of fresh air, even today in the saturated superhero movie market, as it tackles the genre from a less comic book-y perspective. When Bruce Willis discovers his unusual abilities, he doesn’t become a masked vigilante – he simply keeps living his life.
Unbreakable’s twist is possibly Shyamalan’s best, as it’s revealed that the deadly incidents that revealed Willis’ powers were orchestrated by a hellbent Samuel L. Jackson. The only downside is that Shyamalan builds the story to a final showdown and then omits the whole thing, choosing instead to explain the climax in on-screen text.
Signs (73%)
Props to Shyamalan for not making a generic alien invasion movie for his first take on extraterrestrial life. Not only is Signs a mysterious story about crop circles, which are common is alien-themed folklore but not so much in Hollywood blockbusters; it’s also an interesting thematic story about religion.
We meet a cynical preacher who is questioning his faith in God following the gruesome, senseless death of his wife – and that’s when the eponymous “signs” of alien life start to show up. The movie’s greatest failing is its twist that the aliens’ weakness is regular old tap water. Not only is that lame; it doesn’t make sense that aliens who are basically allergic to water would choose to visit a planet that’s 80% water.
Split (77%)
Split was a fantastic movie. It was incredibly creepy and kept viewers on the edge of their seats for the entire runtime. The acting from both leads – James McAvoy, who fully embodies every one of his character’s 24 personalities, and Anya Taylor-Joy, whose character held onto a painful secret for basically the whole movie – anchored the film and sold its twists.
If the movie has one negative point, it’s that it spoiled all the best bits in the trailer. If a viewer went into it having seen the trailer (or studied it, frame by frame, as today’s viewers tend to do), then they would’ve been pretty disappointed to see that they could already see all the scariest parts coming.
The Sixth Sense (86%)
This was the supernatural box office smash that launched Shyamalan’s career and is still considered one of his best movies to this day. It also introduced audiences to the Shyamalan twist, although in retrospect, the twist that captivated a generation of moviegoers doesn’t actually make any sense.
If Bruce Willis was dead the whole time, why did it take him months to realize it? And who hired him to be Haley Joel Osment’s psychiatrist if his mom couldn’t see him? Still, a movie is worth a lot more than its twist, and The Sixth Sense is a well-crafted, engaging, timeless paranormal thriller deserving of its place as one of the highest grossing horror films of all time.
