Oh man. If The Lady in the Water didn’t steer you clear, then The Happening must have. Seriously, the man has run his course, and until he corrects himself, it’s going to be hard to take anything he does seriously. But that shows what can happen in nine years. There was a time, not that long ago, where people were looking forward to everything M. Night Shyamalan did because The Sixth Sense worked like fucking gangbusters. And it still does, it’s just a well made, well conceived piece of Hollywood filmmaking. It works, and please don’t deny it.

Bruce Willis stars as Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a psychiatrist whose marriage with Anna (Olivia Williams) is falling apart, and has a psychotic patient. He begins treating Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), who’s having a hard time because he’s seeing ghosts, and it alienates him from his mother Lynn (Toni Collette), who’s struggling with being a single mom with a weird child. Once Malcolm believes Cole, they go about helping ghosts deal with their traumatic deaths by resolving their issues, which sends them on to the next level.

Everything about this film was a sucker-punch, and a brilliant one at that. You couldn’t count on Bruce Willis to deliver a good film, you had no idea who MNS was, it was a fucking Hollywood Pictures release (“if it’s the Sphinx, it stinks!”) And yet this film still delivers. I think partly because the character work is good, and Shyamalan is working with Frank Marhsall and Kathleen Kennedy. Once the man became a wunderkind, he wasn’t working with people who were creatively working against him to better the product. And so since you’ve seen films that don’t work as well because there isn’t that inherent humanity, and no one’s telling him to change what he’s doing. Obviously, the last two pictures show that in great magnitude, but here, here is why people still have hope for this filmmaker. Hell, I do, and I’ve seen The Happening and The Lady in the Water. And baggage or whatever, The Sixth Sense is a well told tale, and still one of the highlights of 1999’s impressive lineup. There’s no reason to disparage the work of anyone here, from Osment’s preternatural performance, to Willis’ subdued but excellent doct, to Collette, to everyone in between. Hell, even Mischa Barton shows up in this and is good.

The Blu-ray release offers nothing special all things considered, except a uncompressed 5.1 track, along with the standard 5.1 Dolby Digital. Extras include “Reflections from the Set” (39 min.), which talks to the stars and M. Night about the movie, while “Between Two Worlds” (37 min.) talks to the supernatural elements of the movie…

“Moving Pictures: The Storyboard Process” (15 min.) goes into how Shyamalan prepared to make the film by showing his extensive boarding, while “Music and Sound” (7 min.) gives M. Night a chance to sit with composer James Newton Howard (a champion on this film) to talk about the score and the aural work of the movie, while “Reaching the Audience” (4 min.) speaks to the film being a huge hit. “Rules and Clues” (6 min.) talks to the second viewing experience and how to decode some things, while there’s also five deleted scenes (15 min.), and the theatrical trailer and two TV spots.