For good or for ill, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has built his name on trick endings. The Sixth Sense became famous for it, and that set a challenging bar for his second movie, Unbreakable. How do you surprise an audience that came to be surprised? By having a story so rich and strange that their imaginations can scarcely keep up, and certainly can't see what's coming-Unbreakable was a stunning sophomore achievement.

Signs, his third movie, was lighter on the surprise-its revelatory moment was thinner and less awe-inspiring, but the movie succeeded nonetheless by telling such a brilliantly suspenseful story with simple tools, like a great Twilight Zone episode.

With The Village, though, the charm is broken, and we are left with the uncomfortable feeling that our own civilian imaginations are much more robust than our director's fame-addled brain.

William Hurt plays the leader of an Amish-looking town surrounded by supposedly monster-laden woods. The villagers must obey certain rules-such as not wearing red-to avoid being eaten by monsters.

From another director, this might be a fun movie, but since it's from Shyamalan, we know that all can't be as it appears. We know when we sit down in the theater that it can't just be a straight-up horror movie, because then where would the Shyamalan twist be? So maybe the monsters are fake or something.

Whoops, did I just give away the whole movie? Why yes, I believe I did!

So The Village is pretty lame. The acting is great-Bryce Dallas Howard is wonderful as the blind girl, and Joaquin Phoenix is good fun, too-but it's hard to care too much. When Shyamalan finally makes his own signature cameo appearance in the film as a smug little reflection, it's hard not to snort and spit. The honeymoon's over, pal-you're not so cute anymore.

Now run off and make a real movie.