Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers can best be summed up in 4 words: great premise – poor payoff. But here’s the thing, this is not entirely our young director’s fault. In fact, the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan proves that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Ishana easily injects the film with eerie dread and atmospheric delights. She clearly knows how to build suspense, not to mention inject great music to elevate things. In fact, the first 40 or so minutes were full of wonderful tension as the mystery played out in entertaining ways. Then, we got answers. And, unfortunately, that’s where things fall off a cliff. Now, it’s not terrible. It’s actually quite interesting. The issue is how we are fed the information and where the story goes afterwards. It all sucked the life out of the film. The last half felt like a totally different (and definitely not as good) movie. Sure, there are a few twists by the end, but it’s nothing to write home about. A big issue is the paltry character development, outside of Dakota Fanning’s Mina that is. By the way, Fanning, for her part, is pretty great. She clearly has a real handle on the character and shows that her acting talent hasn’t diminished one iota from her child star days. Everybody else? I’ll just say it was hard to care. In fact, by the end, it became so tedious, I wouldn’t have cared if the power suddenly went out and cut things short. Alas, I was held captive and made to finish watching The Watchers…