The Happening Review

Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 06.14.2008

Or, "The Further Degeneration of M. Night Shyamalan"

Directed By: M. Night Shyamalan
Written By: M. Night Shyamalan

Starring:
Mark Wahlberg - Elliot Moore
Zooey Deschanel - Alma Moore
John Leguizamo - Julian
Ashlyn Sanchez - Jess
Betty Buckley - Mrs. Jones
Spencer Breslin - Josh
Robert Bailey Jr. - Jared
Jeremy Strong - Private Auster
Alan Ruck - Principal
M. Night Shyamalan - Joey



Running Time: 91 minutes
Rated R for violent and disturbing images

You have to feel bad for M. Night Shyamalan. The writer/director, who burst onto the movie scene in a $672 million worldwide way with the 1999 thriller-with-a-twist The Sixth Sense, has been widely viewed since then as a man who peaked with his first film. Unbreakable, his second film, got decent if not great reviews, and didn’t even touch the success of the Bruce Willis starrer that began his career. Although 2002’s Signs was far more successful then Unbreakable, the next two films showed that audiences were getting tired of Shyamalan’s self-importance and reliance on his gimmicky twist endings; The Village was critically drubbed and commercially disappointing, while 2006’s fantasy-oriented The Lady in the Water was a complete and utter failure on any count, bringing in a paltry $42.3 million dollars domestically and earning the most scathing reviews of the director’s career. Now, two years later, Shyamalan tries to salvage his critical and commercial darling rep with his first R-rated film, The Happening.

The set-up of the film is admittedly intriguing. It opens in New York City’s iconic Central Park (in my mind, the worst place to be EVER, considering how often it suffers from disasters in Hollywood) on an idyllic summer morning. Suddenly, at 8:33 am, several pedestrians freeze, going dead still. Carnage then unfolds as people start killing themselves off using anything handy, resulting in some truly bizarre and interesting deaths including implements such as knitting needles, lawnmowers, guns, tossing themselves off buildings, or whatever they can most easily find. Of course, the easiest explanation is quickly jumped upon by the media, that the mass self-slaughter is the result of some neurotoxin released by terrorists. The epidemic quickly expands out, encompassing Manhattan and then expanding to other Northeastern cities. The fast start quickly shifts gears, as Shyamalan goes back to his roots of basing his films in his hometown of Philadelphia, with science teacher Elliot Moore (Wahlberg). Elliot takes his wife Alma (Deschanel), his best friend Julian (Leguizamo) and Julian’s daughter Jess (Sanchez) out of the city just in time to escape the outbreak, and wind up stranded in the rural Eastern parts of the state. They set out to escape the disaster and find a place to survive as things steadily get worse and worse, and it becomes obvious that it’s not a terrorist attack as was first believed.

It is unfortunate that, as interesting as a set-up as Shyamalan provides here, The Happening fails the same places his previous disasters have: in exposing his weaknesses. While he's excellent at providing an amazing premise, when it comes to follow-through he more often then not falls on his face. This is exactly what happens here, as Shyamalan ends up focusing on the least interesting part of the story. Granted, it may be more identifiable to the majority of the population to see a small (and diminishing) group of everymen wandering through scenery that can substitute for most of rural America—something he seems to have learned from Signs--but it also forces the writer/director to resort to endless shots of trees and plants waving in the wind. While this may be ominous to some, it’s not to me, and even worse, it ends up being repeated to the point of being laughable. Shyamalan tries to get across a pro-environmental message that comes off as heavy-handed to the point of turning people off from it.

It certainly doesn’t help the movie that the characters Shyamalan has focused on are completely uninteresting. The Mist, another recent film about ordinary people in a world-changing crisis, was most interesting when it focused on the idea of these normal folks, stuck in a situation way beyond their ability to control. Even The Ruins showed how people could be pushed to the edge without civilization to protect them, in order to survive. Here, the film’s protagonist is Elliot, who spends most of the time confused, scared, and indecisive. His wife is emotionally distant, which largely translates into emoting as little as possible. Cast in these roles, the usually great Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel perform embarrassingly poorly. Wahlberg’s Elliot is a weak performance on par with some of his worst, such as Planet of the Apes or Rock Star, and he spends most of his time with his voice in that high-pitched voice he gets when his characters are scared. Deschanel essentially sleepwalks through the film, putting her previous performances in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Weeds to shame. John Leguizamo is better as Julian, but his character disappears so quickly into the film that it could almost be called a cameo. The only true saving grace in the cast is Betty Buckley, who injects a bit of crazy into her role as Mrs. Jones, a woman who’s been living along a little too long by the time the group encounters her.

One of the biggest problems with this movie, like with other films, is that they seem to constantly be Shyamalan going back to what worked in previous films as he tries to say “See, I get it!” This film has the token creepy moments, a la Sixth Sense. It has the rural setting and isolation, a la Signs. It has the everyday Joe in an extraordinary situation, a la Unbreakable. And for once, it lacks the super-secret twist ending that has become his trope. Unfortunately, what Shyamalan fails to do is bring back what made those elements enjoyable. Sixth Sense creepiness worked because it built tension, where as here it is just for shock value. Signs built the rural isolation in a way that made the big picture personal and tied into the main character’s growth and development; here, it has no such context. And Unbreakable’s everyman had a truly interesting counterpart in Samuel L. Jackson’s Elijah Price; in The Happening there is no one nearly so interesting to offset Elliot’s dullness. As for the lack of a twist ending, well…without revealing what happens, allow me to say that he can toss out a predictable, “shocking” twist any time, if this is what he gives us otherwise.

Shyamalan has been called a one, maybe two-hit wonder by many a critic, and with each film, I can’t help but agree more and more. For all the amazing storytelling he gave us alongside seeing dead people, there seems to be a complete dearth of the same in what he has left. It’s a very sad story when someone with so much promise apparently expended it all on their first and second times out; perhaps it’s time for him to start seeing what he can do with someone else’s material, because his personal story well has run dry and is, much like the villain in this movie, blowing in the wind.

The 411: While M. Night Shyamalan has been going downhill for a long time, The Happening is the lowest he's hit yet. Packed with an interesting premise gone quickly awry, intensely bad performances, and constant shots of plants that are as boring as they are supposed to be ominous, it appears the director has little more to give us. The entire film comes off as completely artificial, and the ending--absent the director's usual "twist," leaves us with one of the greatest disappointments seen in theaters in a long time. Nothing here works great, and very little even works in a "good" capacity, leaving us with the worst in a string of bad films from the man once hailed as "the next Hitchcock."

Final Score:  3.5   [ Bad ]