Starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

Out now

Life’s a beach…

‘Soooo… where do you stand on the movies of M Night Shyamalan?’ For any film nut this has to be the deal breaker on a first date.

Okay. Just me.

But let me run with it.

Humanity is split into those who think Shyamalan is a ground breaking high concept genius, and others who find his films head-bangingly ridiculous, usually based on a mind-numbingly dumb premise that falls apart at the slightest prod. I am in the latter category. Take Signs for example. Did those aliens seriously cross the galaxy and not work out that planet Earth was primarily covered in water? And as for The Sixth Sense and The Village. I watched both films patiently waiting for the amazing twist, which then turned out to be the obvious thing I’d worked out in the first five minutes. I gave up after The Happening. If you haven’t seen that film then… don’t. Your life is too precious.

But then Old comes along and it gets a few five-star reviews and so I thought, okay… I’ll risk it. And sure enough, this is a film that is just as ridiculous as all the others – as if conjured from the mind of that hyper active teenage nephew who has you making excuses to not to go on a family visit.

Bonkers premise? Tick. Inane script? Tick. Actors looking so desperate, they’re wondering why they signed the contract? Tick.

But… But… But…

I rather enjoyed it.

If you’ve seen the trailer then you know the set-up. A bunch of hapless tourists find themselves trapped on a mysterious tropical beach where they start to age so rapidly, they will live out their whole lives in a single day. I promise you, that is not a spoiler. It’s in all the promo material, although the characters are so stupid it takes them 45 minutes into the movie to work out what is happening.

Old desperately wants to be profound. It wants to say something about the nature of time, of ageing, about what is really important in life, and for fleeting moments it almost succeeds, but here’s the thing, as anyone who has watched a silent movie or a Benny Hill sketch will tell you, speeded up things are funny.

If all the major milestones of life, death, ageing, degenerative illness and, god help us, puberty, all happen in a space of minutes – and the actors have to act their amazement and distress in double quick time as well… perhaps there’s something wrong with me but half way through the film when it was at its most serious, this reviewer was laughing like a drain. Even the horror scares, one involving accelerated calcium deficiency, played with deadly earnest, was laugh out loud funny. At another point, an emotionally charged ‘heroic’ death plays out like cartoon slapstick, reminiscent of one of Terry Gilliam’s animation sequences from Monty Python.

Perhaps it’s something to do with the bizarre cinematography. It’s as if Shyamalan has handed the camera to that hyper-active teenage nephew we were avoiding earlier. The frame is forever wandering away from the actors, soaring up into the air, running across the beach, but rarely for any good reason. Perhaps this cinematic ADHD is trying to make an artistic point, but if it is, I have no idea what it is.

And then there’s the ending. We all know MNS likes a twist, but is it a spoiler to say there isn’t one this time? Instead we get a random ‘with-one-bound-they-were-free’ moment, and then an equally random conspiracy add-on that seems to come from a completely different film altogether.

Old is all over the place – literally, when you factor in the bewildering camerawork – but there’s so much happening, there is never a dull moment, and Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps act like their reputations depend on it, while Rufus Sewell gives up on his reputation and opts for chewing the scenery instead.

Verdict: Enjoyable tosh, all the more enjoyable for its earnest belief in itself. 7/10

Martin Jameson