The Happening

Some movies are born bad while others, like The Happening, have awfulness thrust upon them. The premise is workable, and some good actors have been assembled, but good Lord, what has writer-director M. Night Shyamalan done here? Is this the same guy so many prematurely dubbed "the next Spielberg" when his 1999 film, The Sixth Sense, became the talk of the town and inspired an overused catch phrase? I refuse to believe that this is the movie Shyamalan wanted to make, but all signs point to that it is. Was he happy with the stilted and wooden dialogue, the complete lack of characterization, and the surprising lack of genuine suspense? The cast frequently look like deers caught in headlights, and I couldn't decide if it was intentional and they were reacting to the things happening to their characters, or if they realized what they had been stuck with.

The film opens in New York's Central Park. A strong breeze blows over the park, and suddenly everyone starts acting disoriented moments before they kill themselves. This bizarre incident spreads throughout the city, and before long construction workers are leaping to their deaths off of the structures they're working on, and traffic cops are drawing their guns on themselves. This should be an attention grabbing opening, but something is off here. Maybe it's the fact that this sequence has been so highly publicized in the film's ad campaign (so much so that Fox is pretty much selling this film solely on the fact that this is the filmmaker's first R-rated film.), but it just didn't elicit any thrills for me. Some members of the audience were even laughing during a scene where multiple people play a game of "pass the gun", where a line up of people shoot themselves one-by-one. This is an early sign that there is something off about The Happening, and it only grows from there. The storytelling is empty, the performances are unconvincing, the screenplay reads like an early draft, and there's just nothing to grab our attention. Things don't improve much when we meet our hero, a Philadelphia high school science teacher named Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), who gathers his wife (Zooey Deschanel) and the daughter of a friend (Ashlyn Sanchez), and tries to find a safe place when he hears about the situation in New York. When the incidents start to spread and the world starts to shut down, Elliot and a small team of survivors try to make sense of what's going on. The problem is, we just don't care.

Not that Shyamalan gives us much to care about here. He seems to be on total auto-pilot mode, and there's nothing that stands out. It all starts with the fact that Elliot and his wife, Alma, are not written as very interesting people, nor have they been given much personality. There's a hint that Alma has been having somewhat of an affair with another man behind Elliot's back, but absolutely nothing is done with this knowledge. It doesn't add any real tension, the characters hardly talk about it once the information is revealed, and it seems to have been thrown in the script, only to be forgotten about. None of the colorful and bizarre characters they meet along the way are given much to do, either. There's a military soldier who ran away after his base became infected, there's a wacko who seems obsessed with plants and hot dogs, and there's a psychotic old lady (an over the top Betty Buckley) who offers Elliot shelter for a short while, before she becomes paranoid and starts screaming about him plotting to kill her for no reason. Nothing is done with any of these characters, and the movie wouldn't be any better or worse off without them. They just exist to run away from whatever is killing people for a little while, and then get killed themselves in a cheesy and over the top fashion.

So, just what is causing all this to happen? I will not reveal it here, but Shyamalan does let us know early on that it's something being carried on the breeze. Therefore, we get a lot of "ominous" shots of trees and grass swaying in the breeze, alerting us that something bad is supposed to go on. As I'm sure you can guess, it doesn't work quite the way the film intends. There's so many shots of grass swaying in the breeze that it starts to border on self parody. It also brings about one of the film's most unintentionally hilarious moments where Elliot and his group are somehow able to outrun the wind. They're standing there in a field, and suddenly that oh-so ominous breeze starts to come toward them, unsettling the previously still grass. The wind slowly starts to approach them, and they run, staying ahead of the breeze for a short while. Ask yourself, how fast would these people have to be running in order to outrun the wind? Even for a short while, they would have to be really hoofing it to keep ahead. If the movie was successful at creating some genuine suspense, I still would have laughed, but at least could have looked past it. I couldn't ignore it here, because by that point, I was desperate for anything to grab my attention.

The fact that Shyamalan has made a disappointing film doesn't really surprise me anymore, given some of his current work. But still, even his past misfires contained one good performance to carry me through. (Bryce Dallas Howard in The Village, Paul Giamatti in Lady in the Water) No such luck this time. Though the cast assembled is impressive, they seem to have left their talent behind in their respective trailers. Mark Wahlberg keeps the same "deer in the headlights" look on his face, no matter what may be happening to him at the present time. I don't think anyone could have pulled off the scene where he gives a monologue to a rubber potted plant (and no, I'm not kidding), but this is a definite low point in what has long been a noteworthy career. Co-stars Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo (as Wahlberg's best friend) are both completely lost and given nothing to do. It's not just the fact that their roles have been grossly underwritten, it's also that everyone comes off so unnaturally. They either recite their lines as if they're performing amateur night, or they overact to ridiculous levels. (As is the case with Betty Buckley's out of the blue third act appearance.)

It's hard to pinpoint just how The Happening goes wrong, because it goes wrong in so many ways. I'd say that maybe Shyamalan's heart wasn't in it this time, but truth be told, I'm beginning to have a hard time convincing myself that he even believes in his own work anymore. This is a definite low point in a rapidly fading career, and the fact that he's finally planning to move beyond thrillers is welcome news indeed. His next project, is rumored to at least allow him to branch out beyond thrillers and try something different. Wether it will be a successful gamble is a whole other story.

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