Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Written By: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, & John Leguizamo
Runtime: 91 min.
Rating: R
Trailer

Nothing really happens in M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, but what makes The Happening so memorable is that it manages to get exponentially more ridiculous and vacuous as it progresses. What Shyamalan’s intentions were in telling this story, if that’s what it can be called, is beyond my understanding seeing as the film deteriorates into a lazy, uninspired B-movie that offers up little, if any, thrills or scares, which are M. Knight’s bread and butter, despite what he may think his true talents lie.

As for the plot, which revolves around an airborne toxin that causes people to commit suicide en masse and in a matter of seconds, appears interesting at first until it is revealed early on that the toxin is part of large-scale revenge fantasy on the part of the trees. Apparently, M. Knight wants to ruminate on society’s destruction of the environment by convincing audiences to be frightened by foliage. It’s not like he doesn’t try to make them sinister. Working with long-time collaborator Tak Fujimoto, a cinematographer of considerable talent, Shyamalan comically lingers on shots of trees, shrubs and grasses, while hordes of humanity try to outrun the wind.

Shyamalan’s characters this time around not only pale in comparison to those he’s created in previous films but they manage to become more wooden than the scenery. Mark Wahlberg plays science teacher Elliott Moore so badly it is hard not to think that it was done on purpose as some weird homage to B-movie campiness. Wahlberg channels the peevish behavior of a ten-year-old child as Elliott. In some passages, like when the train car he is on with his wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), stops in the middle of the Pennsylvania countryside, Elliott has a small monologue in which all he does is berate the conductor with questions in a shrill whine that is similar to a small boy pleading to his mommy that he be allowed to stay up an extra hour to watch Transformers. All the actors are like this, from Deschanel, the is-she-or-isn’t-she adulterous wife, to John Leguizamo, a fellow science teacher and father to Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). And although the actors look ridiculous throughout, the criticism falls squarely on Shyamalan himself, who, as the credits remind us, wrote, produced and directed this mess. After the terrific Signs, Shyamalan’s movies have gotten worse in their ability to tell an interesting and moving story that frightens and challenges the conventions of the standard Hollywood blockbuster. One of the joys of his early films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and to a certain extent, The Village) was the confidence he had in the story he was telling. You knew when the lights went down that you were in the hands of a first-rate filmmaker.

Not only does The Happening lack the narrative inventiveness of Shyamalan’s previous work (The Lady in the Water), as his script seems to have been hastily patched together at the last minute, but he fails to provide visuals warranting a reaction other than boredom. It’s amazing that there is only one shot in the entire film that is memorable: construction workers willingly falling to their deaths from a high-rise. Otherwise, The Happening is visually lifeless, a feat I never would have thought possible in an M. Knight Shyamalan film. It’s sad to think that this is the same director who shot Robin Wright Penn being carried up the stairs by Bruce Willis in a single, unbroken close up in Unbreakable. Great visuals are born out of a rich and interesting story with believable characters. Seeing as The Happening has none of the above, it is no surprise that the film is the weakest of Shyamalan’s oeuvre and will likely be the worst film of 2008.

Richard X
© Cinephile Magazine, 2008