M. Night Shyamalan has a weird streak of bizarre attempts at humor that I’m fairly sure fall flat with most audiences. In The Happening there’s this weird moment where a character discusses the virtues of hot dogs, which he concludes are an underrated food that have “a cool shape.” I mean, this is really weird right? Like I get that this character is supposed to come off as weird, but in a movie that already feels tonally off, this feeble attempt at injecting humor into a random scene comes off as a little desperate, especially when it’s pretty much the only moment of levity in the whole thing.
After Earth does the same thing a couple of times, but one stands out as being a complete non-sequitur and maybe I’m just crazy but it had me shaking my head and unable to focus on anything that happened for several minutes following. It’s that moment where Kitai’s suit changes color to camouflage in with his surroundings, going from whatever it was, light grey, to dark black. He speaks into his microphone to his dad, saying something like “My suit changed color. I like it, but I think it’s something bad.” That “I like it” seems so bizarrely inserted, as though it’s supposed to be funny but it ends up coming off as just really confusing in this movie that is almost completely serious and devoid of humor for its entire running time. I’m not sure how other serious movies pull off humor, but for some reason this moment that Shyamalan puts in is not a good kind of weird.
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