Is it just me, or does Bruce Willis only seem to come alive as an actor when he's deeply anguished and/or borderline crazed? As the haunted child psychiatrist in this somber thriller about a young boy who's being haunted rather more literally, he's so blandly self-possessed that he seems to be acting under the influence of heavy tranquilizers; in retrospect, I can almost see how that might make sense, given the character that he's playing, but it still makes for a somewhat leaden viewing experience. Fortunately, Osment picks up the slack and then some, in a role that twenty-five years ago would have been handed immediately to Jodie Foster (the kid's gender isn't really important); he's the consummate pre-adolescent pro, compulsively watchable despite coming across more as a miniature, preternaturally wise adult than as a child. (Thankfully, he's given zero smart-ass dialogue, so you're not rooting for the ghosts to disembowel him.) The premise is strong enough that I had a reasonably good time in spite of the molasses-in-a-Frigidaire pace set by Willis, at least until the whole thing turned woozily therapeutic; I won't rehash the attack on Psych 101 flicks that I launched in my review of Good Will Hunting, since I can simply point you toward it, but suffice to say that the final two reels feature healin' a-plenty. Which brings us, of course, to the ending, which simultaneously improves upon and detracts from everything that's preceded it: on the one hand, it's great masochistic fun, assuming that you didn't guess what was coming, to replay the entire movie in your head and count the number of painfully obvious clues that you somehow overlooked; on the other, the twist is so thoroughly contrived that even I, who happily bought the preposterous conclusions of Arlington Road and The Game, found myself unable to reconcile its inconsistencies and contradictions.* It's clever but unsatisfying, and that'll do nicely as a description of the film itself, come to think.

* (I couldn't fit it neatly into the body of the review, but I would like to note that your acceptance/understanding of one of the film's subplots requires you to be familiar with an exceedingly strange psychological disorder called Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, which I confess that I was not. I wound up searching for basic info on the web after I got home, after reading a Usenet post in which the syndrome was mentioned by name; if you're as clueless as I was, you might want to look into it in advance. Don't worry, it's not much of a spoiler.)

[Usenet post to add on Lbox]

You're right, it was no big deal, and I'll tell you why: because in GHOST, we're not initially *presented* with the very convention/cliche that the film is subsequently to disregard. I didn't much care for GHOST, but at least it was internally consistent: it told you up-front what ghosts could and couldn't do, what made them different from the living, and the same rules applied equally to every ghost we saw (as best I can recall; it's been almost a decade now, which is way more frightening to me than any damn movie, lemme tell ya).

In the SIXTH SENSE, on the other hand, many if not most of the ghosts *are* doing some rather traditional haunting; it's only *select* ghosts who are able to put on their ectoplasmic boogie shoes. Basically, as far as I can tell, the ghosts in this movie do whatever is most convenient for the script at that particular moment. If Shyamalan needs them to stay put where they died, then they do; if he needs them to roam, off they go; if he needs them to feed secret info to Cole, they suddenly get all chatty; if he needs them to be eerily silent, they merely give Cole haunting looks with very wide eyes; if he needs them to scare the bejeezus out of the audience, they obsessively relive a traumatic moment; if he needs to trick the audience into thinking they're still alive, they move progressively forward into a corporeal-like future. These are some mighty mutable specters, man.

I'm repeating myself. My more specific point in this post is that I have no objection to wandering ghosts; just don't cloud the issue by also showing me a bunch of stationary ghosts to boot. If you're going to ignore a convention, don't wallow in it at the same time. Pick a scenario and run with it, lest you appear to be covering your ass.