‘M. Night Shyamalan’s Old is a one-star movie’

It’s so silly that it is worth seeing, including but not only for the scene in which Australian model and actor Abbey Lee goes all Exorcist because she fears she’s losing her looks.

Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre), Prisca (Vicky Krieps), Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Chrystal (Abbey Lee) in Old, written for the screen and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

Old (M)
In cinemas
★★

As a piece of filmmaking, M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, a thriller set on a tropical beach, is a one-star movie. Yet it scores better if we switch to the should-I-see-it? indicator.

It’s so silly that it is worth seeing, including but not only for the scene in which Australian model and actor Abbey Lee (Mad Max: Fury Road) goes all Exorcist because she fears she’s losing her looks.

I am a fan of Shyamalan, who remains best known for his third feature, The Sixth Sense (1999). In more recent times I liked the horror movie The Visit (2015) and the connected Split (2016) and Glass (2019), which concluded an excellent trilogy that started with Unbreakable (2000).

His new film shows that anyone can have a bad day at the office. Perhaps one of the characters, Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal), has a sixth sense about this. “It’s hard to explain,’’ he says early on. He speaks the truth.

Guy, an actuary, is one of a group of people trapped on a beach at an exclusive resort. He is married to Prisca (Vicky Krieps), who is a museum curator. They have an 11-year-old daughter and six-year-old son.

Charles (Rufus Sewell) is a surgeon and Chrystal (Abbey Lee) is his trophy wife. They have a six-year-old daughter named Kara.

Jarin (Ken Leung) is a nurse and his wife Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is a psychologist.

They are sent to this idyllic private beach by the obsequious but obviously creepy resort manager (Gustav Hammarsten). “It’s our little secret,’’ he tells them.

Another man (Aaron Pierre), who the kids believe is a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan, is on the white sand beach when they arrive. So, soon afterwards, is a dead woman, washed in from the surf.

We soon learn that all of the adults have problems, physical, mental or emotional. It’s the kids, however, who show the first signs that something is strangely wrong. Within hours of being there, they have each aged about six years, going from children to adolescents.

As the title suggests, this 108-minute movie is centred on a rapid acceleration of the ageing process. I thought it might be like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, one of Brad Pitt’s best films, in reverse. I thought wrong.

The chronological fast forward is not good for the dog on the trip.

Having guessed what is happening, the adults (which soon include the children, with Australia’s Eliza Scanlen as the older Kara), have to work out how to stop this expedited maturation, or how to escape the beach. Also, they think someone is watching them.

What follows is like an episode of the television series Survivor, with a nod to Lord of the Flies. The surgeon keeps asking the others the name of a film starring Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. It’s not the one that might be relevant to his situation, The Island of Dr Moreau, as Nicholson is not in it, but perhaps that’s the point: the doctor’s mind is adrift.

The actual source material is the 2011 French-Swiss graphic novel, Sandcastle, which is far more ambiguous than what we see on screen. The script (by the director, who also has a cameo role) and the performances combine to deliver something so hammy it is funny.

When you have a film in which people might age half a lifetime in one day, and you open it with lines such as “Stop wishing away this moment” (Prisca to her kids en route to the resort) and “You’re always thinking about the future” (Prisca to her husband, ditto), it feels like you are having a lend of us.

On that point, while different actors play the children as they age, we are stuck with the same actors as the adults. There are scenes towards the end that I found a little insulting to the elderly.

I should say that there are critics who like this movie. Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian, who I respect, handed it five stars. He said it made him think of Star Trek, which is lost on me. He added that it is “audacious, ingenious hokum”. There I agree, once the adjectives are removed.

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Jungle Cruise (M)
In cinemas and on Disney+
★★★½

If you are in the mood for some escapist entertainment, book a berth on the Disney romantic adventure Jungle Cruise. It stars Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, who have a terrific chemistry, a scene stealing Jack Whitehall, a suitably over-the-top Jesse Plemons and a CGI leopard.

The film is named after a riverboat ride at Disney theme parks and there are some amusing riffs on that commercial connection, such as when skipper Frank Wolff (Johnson) steers his boatload of tourists past patently fake hippos.

“Know this about the jungle,’’ he warns, sipping from a hip flask, as he takes the camera clickers down the Amazon. “Everything you see wants to kill you, and can.” Well, yes and no.

As the flask-sipping suggests, the real inspir­ation for this movie is John Huston’s 1951 classic The African Queen, based on the novel by CS Forester and starring Humphrey Bogart and Kath­arine Hepburn.

Jack Whitehall as Macgregor, Emily Blunt as Lily and Dwayne Johnson as Frank in Jungle Cruise. Photo: Frank Masi. © 2021 Disney Enterprises

The films are set at the same time, soon after the outbreak of World War I.

This time around, Johnson is Bogart, and there are lots of jokes about the former wrestler’s size. Blunt, as English scientist Lily Houghton, and Whitehall, as her foppish younger brother McGregor, sort of combine to be Hepburn and it works well.

When the skipper jettisons frivolous cargo, it belongs not to the no-nonsense sister but to her brother, who argues that dinner without a dinner jacket is not dinner at all.

“If I wanted to go to a primitive backwater where I can’t understand what anyone is saying,” he declares, “I’d visit our relatives in Scotland.” Ouch! Let’s note that Bogart’s Charlie Allnut, a cockney in the novel, was filmed as a Canadian because the star couldn’t do the accent. And let’s note that in that film the brother (Robert Morley) didn’t last long.

Dr Houghton wears trousers and much is made of this. The skipper calls her “Pants” and she calls him “Skippy”. Coincidentally, while roaming Facebook this week I saw a post about the day Marlene Dietrich was threatened with arrest for wearing trousers in Paris in 1933.

The adventure set-up is that Dr Houghton and her brother, children of a celebrated English explorer, are on the Amazon in search of a legendary tree that could cure all ills. They believe finding this tree, and its life-preserving flowers, will revolutionise modern medicine.

They hire the skipper after he impresses them by seeing off a leopard that wanders into a dockside bar. Or so it seems. That cat becomes an important character.

There’s another group in search of the tree and, this being 1916, they are Germans and they are baddies. They have a U-boat and are led by Prince Joachim (Plemons, revelling in the German accent), youngest son of German emperor Wilhelm II. There’s a third group, related to the fact Spanish conquistadors looked for the tree four centuries earlier.

This history feeds into the skipper’s backstory and as a result we briefly see The Rock, as he was known in the ring, with long hair and a beard. He is almost unrecognisable.

When it comes to the romantic set-up, look no further than that “Pants” and “Skippy” routine. I’ve long wanted to see action man Johnson in a romantic role, and he delivers. There’s an underwater scene between the two stars, a nod to the one in The African Queen where Bogart and Hepburn are tossed overboard, that is quite beautiful.

There’s an interesting change of tack behind the camera, too.

The director, Jaume Collet-Serra, is best known for horror films such as The House of Wax (2005) and action thrillers with Liam Neeson, the most recent of which is The Commuter (2018). He shows, with a switched-on cast, that he can do an engaging comedy.

If you are in lockdown and seeking a few hours of light relief, this 128-minute film, available on Disney+, should do the trick. I enjoyed the playful parallels with The African Queen. Towards the end, it leaves this behind and morphs into a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark with zombie conquistadors. I liked that less, but it might work for other viewers.