Wide Awake
Dir: M. Night Shyamalan
1998
*
Wide Awake is M. Night Shyamalan's second directional project but his first mainstream film to have a cinema release. I have to confess that I absolutely hated it. It's not funny when it tries, it has a particularly annoying Julia Stiles in it, annoying nine year old boys talking like adults and a predictable ending, and not a particularly good one either. It tries to invigorate the feel of many a like-minded drama that were popular at the time and pulls desperately on the heart-strings but I'm afraid it fails with each and every attempt. This is down to inexperience and it is rather telling that the young Shyamalan's parents were the executive producers. It's lost millions at the box office and it's amazing that he ever worked again, more so that he made one of the most successful films of all time just one year later. It's basically a colour by numbers shameless attempt at emotional manipulation, except they only used one colour and went over the lines too often.