At the 2021 Comedy Central Roast of Bruce Willis, host Joseph Gordon-Levitt delivered this classic joke: “I loved ‘The Sixth Sense.’ It’s a great movie. And the ending, I did not see that twist coming … At the end of ‘The Sixth Sense,’ Bruce goes back to making sh***y movies.”
It’s funny because, well, it’s sort of true: “The Sixth Sense” is widely considered one of the last truly good Bruce Willis movies. Sure, he gave some fun performances in “Lucky Number Slevin” and “Moonrise Kingdom,” but the spooky 1999 M. Night Shyamalan drama was pretty much the last time Willis was the leading man in a massive critical and commercial hit.
On IMDb, “The Sixth Sense” has an 8.2 rating, ranking it 144th among the site’s top 250 list of best-ranked movies. It’s not a surprising placement, given how influential it became in pop culture. People were quoting “I see dead people” for years afterwards, and it’s become a popular sitcom trope for a jerk character to spoil the movie’s ending for another character getting into it for the first time.
The movie was so good that it cast a giant, somewhat-unfair shadow over the rest of the director’s movies. For over a decade M. Night Shyamalan was having his projects constantly compared to “The Sixth Sense,” an unfair standard to judge any movie by. The movie also earned Shyamalan a reputation for his big, “Twilight Zone”-style twists, even though there’s a lot more to his storytelling than that.
But as iconic as “The Sixth Sense” was, according to IMDb it’s still only the third highest-rated movie in Willis’ filmography. His real highest-rated film came out five years earlier, with Willis playing a smaller role…