10 Underrated Movies Everyone Loved At First (But Now Dislikes)

4. The Sixth Sense

The Awesome Movie: A tight, atmospheric chiller so popular on release it was the closest we got to a movie toppling the box office juggernaut of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (disappointment it may be remembered as, but people still flocked to see it), The Sixth Sense had an enticing hook - Bruce Willis teams up with a kid who can see ghosts - that slowly expands into a story of redemption and acceptance. M. Night Shyamalan is the mastermind, and his trademark style - long, sweeping takes and pseudo-heavy dialogue - grounds the film.

Oh, and at the end you find out that Bruce Willis was a ghost all along. Which is great on so many levels.

What Happened? Bruce Willis is a ghost. One of the most commonly accepted spoilers of all time, everybody paraphrased The Sixth Sense down to this one beat, rendering the previous 100 minutes almost moot. It wasn't just the audience who did that though - the director himself seemed to take this one aspect as the centre of his genius.

And that's the big thing that happened; M. Night Shyamalan went on to have a spiralling car-crash of a career, built around the idea that he was a narrative genius who could turn anything he touched to gold. His movies boasted alternatively obvious or ridiculous twists that bogged down everything he subsequently produced; he's not made an out-and-out great film since Unbreakable (although The Visit was a major step up). As such, his reputation is no longer of being "The Next Spielberg", and all of his movies, even his assuredly great ones, have been tarred.