10 Directors Who Completely Ruined Their Careers With One Movie
10. M Night Shyamalan
The Killer Movie: Lady In The Water It's pretty hard to remember these days, but M Night Shyamalan used to be a legitimately great film-maker: yes, he was a little too reliant on twists, but his shtick was backed up with technical quality and good scripts (some might forget he even wrote the joyous Stuart Little.) But then, he followed up The Village, which was already slightly slipping down the quality scale after the high of Unbreakable and the very good Signs, with Lady In The Water, a risible, unfocused mess with the most accidentally aptly named hero ever, in the shape of Cleveland Heep. It was badly structured, amateur and odd, as if the director was railing against his success, and if it weren't for the just-as-bad films that followed it, we could well have dismissed this as a blip. And regardless of those movies, there's no doubting that Shyamalan's career was ruined: he's never recovered from the critical lashing, and the confident understatement of his first movies has been replaced by an insistent over-compensation. The thing is, noone seems to have told M Night, since he's able to keep trying to ruin his career every time he releases a new movie, without the self-awareness that he's long past his sell-by date, and he needs to stop messing about and just make Unbreakable 2.
The Killer Movie: Lady In The Water It's pretty hard to remember these days, but M Night Shyamalan used to be a legitimately great film-maker: yes, he was a little too reliant on twists, but his shtick was backed up with technical quality and good scripts (some might forget he even wrote the joyous Stuart Little.) But then, he followed up The Village, which was already slightly slipping down the quality scale after the high of Unbreakable and the very good Signs, with Lady In The Water, a risible, unfocused mess with the most accidentally aptly named hero ever, in the shape of Cleveland Heep. It was badly structured, amateur and odd, as if the director was railing against his success, and if it weren't for the just-as-bad films that followed it, we could well have dismissed this as a blip. And regardless of those movies, there's no doubting that Shyamalan's career was ruined: he's never recovered from the critical lashing, and the confident understatement of his first movies has been replaced by an insistent over-compensation. The thing is, noone seems to have told M Night, since he's able to keep trying to ruin his career every time he releases a new movie, without the self-awareness that he's long past his sell-by date, and he needs to stop messing about and just make Unbreakable 2.