Allow me to get a few things out of the way up front: I love M. Night Shyamalan movies. I think Signs is an amazing popcorn sci-fi suspense movie, Unbreakable may be the perfect blend of cinematic realism and superhero mythology, and The Sixth Sense is such a solid, tightly written Hollywood thriller you could teach a semester-long class on the script alone. Hell, I even dug the creepy weirdness that was The Village, in spite of its unevenness.

As for Shyamalan himself, I think he is a very talented storyteller, with a keen visual sensibility, a great sense of timing, and a knack for making movies that are both fun to watch and quite moving. I also think he has become a very insular person, and as a businessman and public figure, he thinks far too highly of himself and takes things far too personally.

I do not believe he is a one-trick-pony egomaniac, and I do not believe he is the next Alfred Hitchcock. I think he is a guy who has made some damn fine movies.

I mention these things because, for whatever reason, opinions of M. Night Shyamalan's films have gotten downright hyperbolic and opinions of the man himself seem to be clouding reviews of his new movie, Lady in the Water. Since it seems many filmgoers (or at least, many critics) can't separate their opinions of the filmmaker and his history from their opinion of Lady, and since people seem passionate and polarized on the whole Shyamalan thing, I decided to get it out of the way up front and let you, the reader, decide whether I sound like-minded enough that you will want to hear what I have to say, or disregard me on general principle and hit the "back" button on your browser.

Still here?

Good.

Lady in the Water is not as bad as you may have heard. It's just not nearly as good as it should be.

The film, as the marketing has no doubt told you, is presented as a "bedtime story." It is a self-contained fable where ordinary people – the tenants of a Philadelphia apartment complex – find themselves having to act out the roles of characters of a mysterious myth when a water nymph named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard) appears in the swimming pool. The trouble with all of the original mythology is it is all being explained in rich detail and without an ounce of subtlety as it is playing itself out. There is a complete lack of prescience to the way things unfold: we don't get the joy of anticipating what's going to happen, or a moment to soak in what's going on, we just hear someone talk about it.

And boy, do they ever talk about it. In order to explain the mysterious Story and set up her world, there is a hell of a lot of ad hoc information-spewing going on. Since so much energy is spent on explaining things like "scrunts" and "kii" and "the great eatlon," it leaves next to no time to help establish characters or lend weight to the situation. In all the fuss to get us up to speed on what is going on, someone forgot to let us know we're supposed to give a damn that it's happening. The movie is over before it's done setting up its own back story.