Review: The Happening

I'm a fan of the films of M. Night Shyamalan. I loved The Sixth Sense when it first came out; I dug Unbreakable when I first saw it, and have only come to appreciate it more as my tastes have matured; I still think Signs is great, simple, effective popcorn fun with lots of heart; I think that The Village, while uneven, is beautiful to look at and never boring. I didn't hate Lady in the Water the way some people did, but I didn't much care for it. I dismissed it as a vanity exercise that went wildly out of hand. Shyamalan's track record, while decreasingly impressive with each outing, was strong enough that I was able to believe he could still make great movies.

When I first heard the premise of The Happening -- that something in the air was causing groups of people to spontaneously commit suicide -- I had the same reaction that I think most people had: sounds creepy, but potentially lame. But the more I heard about it, the more I considered it in the context of other superficially-misanthropic but ultimately heartfelt and cautionary sci-fi films like Soylent Green or Children of Men. This could actually be pretty cool.

Then came the early reviews, which were at best disappointed and at worst outright vicious. Knowing that the infamously narcissistic Shyamalan is something of a polarizing figure in internet geek culture, I was able to dismiss the more venomous criticisms, but it certainly didn't raise my hopes any. Then as the release approached, I checked the movie's rating on Rottentomatoes and saw it fluctuating between the low 20's and low teens. Then every person I know who had seen the movie warned me against seeing it. I had to see what could possibly be so bad.

The Happening may well be the worst movie I have ever paid money to go see.

You have got to see The Happening.

It's bad. It's bad like a disease. It's congenitally, pathologically bad. It's a train wreck, but not a normal one. It's the wreckage of a train rocketed off the rails onto a desert of jagged rocks by a jet engine that just. won't. stop.

It starts off promisingly enough. Right out of the gate, we get a series of violent public mass suicides that are chilling in their suddenness, disturbing in their grisly detail, and ultimately rather silly but nonetheless entertaining. Unfortunately -- and especially disappointingly from a director with an established history of knowing a thing or two about suspense -- all the good stuff is in this very first scene. Things grind pretty quickly to a halt afterwards as we plunge into long stretches of Phantom Menace-esque dialogue so stilted that only a circus acrobat could successfully walk them.

Unfortunately, nobody here seems quite up to the task, or even completely sure what that would entail. Mark Wahlberg, who Shyamalan says he wrote the lead character for, spends the whole movie seeming clearly out of his element as the film's high school science teacher protagonist. Perhaps Shyamalan intended to exploit the actor's obvious disorientation in order to convey a sense of panic and confusion. Maybe that's why the camera spends so much time tight on his face. The infinitely watchable Zooey Deschanel is given absolutely nothing to do as the why-are-we-supposed-to-care-about-this-exactly love interest. Her best moments are her unscripted face takes between being forced to speak brain-meltingly lines like "I'm uncomfortable expressing my feelings, too." Then there's John Leguizamo who is wasted in a short role which gives him the dubious honor of having to snap the line that made my audience finally turn on the movie thirty minutes in; "don't you take my daughter's hand unless you mean it!" One of the critiques of Lady in the Water was that it the dialogue lacked any subtext. For The Happening, Shyamalan has invented dialogue with supertext.

Beyond the film's flawed premise, awkward dialogue, pedestrian visual vocabulary, even the more fluffy superficial stuff doesn't work. "Quirky" minor characters, like the goofy greenhouse owning family that really likes hotdogs, a couple of wise-cracking kids whose only purpose in the film seems to be getting killed in front of Wahlberg, and a Forrest Gumpian army private who runs around and stammers, all strain for some kind of folksy humor and consistently fall flat on their faces. The attempts at humor often come in the middle of moments of peril, leaving the audience not laughing, but rather suddenly ripped out of whatever sense of peril they may have felt. The deaths, on the other hand, become increasingly hilarious, my personal favorite being the zookeeper getting his CG arms ripped off by lions in a greenscreen zoo pen. Then there's this incredibly dumb scare near the end involving a doll that I'm still scratching my head over. I'm serious: nothing in this movie works.

At the end of the movie, you're left feeling as if you've just watched a film adaptation of the kind of irredeemably, senselessly violent thing that a seventh-grader would write and get sent to the counselor's office. Like Cole's drawing of a man "hurting another man in the neck with a screwdriver" in The Sixth Sense, it makes you worry. I was hoping that I would leave The Happening with a restored faith in a filmmaker who has made some brilliant and thrilling pop work in his relatively short career. I left with something better: a drinking game.

Take a drink:
- Every time we go in for a close-up of Wahlberg looking confused.
- Every time there's a "scary" shot of "scary" wind blowing through "scary" plants.
- Every time somebody says the word "happening."
- Every time a minor character says something "quaint."
- Every time there's a bit of voice-over dialogue in a scene transition obviously recorded in post to try to tie things together.
- Every time Zooey Deschanel outclasses the movie.
- Every time one of the suicides makes you laugh instead of flinch.