Rating of
2.5/4
Still a decent recovery
Pat - wrote on 05/31/16
Writer and director M. Night Shyamalan gave us movies such as The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs several years ago. As of late, movie fans and critics have not been too kind to his films including The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth. Luckily, The Visit does have merit.
We all know that casting good child actors can be tough. I honestly believe that the two child actors in this movie nailed it. In fact I would say the child actors were much better in this movie than the actors of the grandparents. That’s one of the main problems I had with this movie believe it or not. I hate to say this but I’m going to compare overall acting in The Visit to The Sixth Sense. While these movies are both different in many ways, The Sixth Sense had perfectly acted roles, no matter how old they were. I mean Haley Joel Osment had the greatest child acting chops of 1999, and Bruce Willis and Toni Collette literally became their characters. On the other hand, in The Visit, I saw the grandparents’ actors as actors, not characters.
A problem I also had with The Visit is that it felt like an hour and a half build up to...nothing very interesting. However, I enjoyed this build up; it is simply that I wish I had seen something unpredictable occur earlier in the film. If this movie was longer, I think I could have seen characters develop more as well as the story. While we are on the subject of the story, I thought the story was a bit dull. Think about it like this: the story to The Visit is pretty much exactly how you foresee. The story could be told as a completely improvised bedtime story, maybe not the most appropriate one though.
The Visit is not for everyone. Not because it’s scary, not because it has a predictable plot, and not because some of the acting was kind of average. It is merely because it is very unconventional. The music in The Visit is extremely minimal, which I personally had not much of a problem with, but I could see people saying “Oh there should have been more music in the film.” The pace is very slow as well. Plus there was a TON of wasted potential. But in the end, I do not regret seeing The Visit, but it’s not groundbreaking and takes forever for things to actually develop. Like I said earlier, the movie does have merit and enjoyment, but you think that it leads to something interesting for way too long, and after waiting and waiting and waiting, you are still waiting when the credits roll.
