In Revelations, Death will eventually enter on a pale horse followed by Hell, to whom “power was given […] over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth”; however, it seems the apocalypse is equally foretold when an unstoppable money-making force meets the harbinger of terrible movies and fodder for my most sardonically cynical posts.
A recent Time article has foretold this paradox that threatens to tear its way through Hollywood’s celluloid continuum when it announced that “Will Smith and son Jaden plan to star in a new M. Night Shyamalan-directed flick.”
An immediate – and accurate – reaction to this news is that only two possible solutions could present themselves here. First off, the Smith family’s journey into remaking all eighties movies will be heavily impeded and ultimately derailed when they team up with Shyamalan to remake Back to the Future, but this time, a twist is added in which George McFly (Crispin Glover) fails to knock out Biff, but instead of continuing to be Biff’s lackey, McFly wanders home with head hung low, and soon after, stumbles upon an article about serial killer Ed Gein, with whose sheltered and lonesome existence he finds compassion, driving George to lay low until he can accost Lorraine Baines (Lea Thompson) and Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) on their wedding day and proceed to hold Lorraine captive while he fashions Biff’s corpse into a Biff-suit so that he can play the role of “Daddy” as Marty McFly vanishes from existence while jamming to Huey Lewis is a cross-time split screen.
The more likely – and even perhaps more ominous – outcome of this endeavor is that Shyamalan’s career is resurrected, and he no longer inspires moviegoers to purge laughter at the brief flash of his name during a preview. However frightening this prediction is, it seems rather probable, and mostly because Shyamalan – while still the director of the “futuristic sci-fi story set 1,000 years set in the future” – seems unlikely to have any say about the content of the film, which is often the weakest part of his movies. Directorially, his past movies are entertaining, and even though his techniques sometimes border on pretention rather than necessity, his skill lies behind the camera.
But, this new project seems to have manufactured an antidote for his previous flops inasmuch as Jada Pinkett Smith, along with Will Smith are “co-producing the Shyamalan flick,” which suggests that anything not deemed Smith-worthy will not be filmed. And, this is where Shyamalan’s resurrection begins. While Will Smith has a few movies that I wish I had never seen, the majority have been entertaining, but more importantly for Shyamalan, only three movies since the release of Bad Boys in 1995 have grossed less than one-hundred million dollars (Ali, The Legend of Bagger Vance, and Seven Pounds), and most of them have grossed well over two-hundred million, even those that were critically questionable like I am Legend and Hancock.
The point here is that Smith is – even on a bad day – box-office gold, so if anything were to redeem the fatefully terrible movies of Shyamalan, with the lone exception being Unbreakable (the argument that The Sixth Sense is void because the movie is completely un-rewatchable and, honestly, the twist at the end is the only reason why people forget about how viscous the actual story is), it would be the presence of the Smith family, whose ability to churn out moneymakers is nearly preternatural.
You know, after this venture, we might want to prepare ourselves for a remake of Back to the Future.
