Featured Review: THE HAPPENING

The Happening


Starring- Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Ashlyn Sanchez, Betty Buckley, Spencer Breslin


Directed by M. Night Shyamalan



Grade: C






"We've lost contact."
"With whom?"
"With everyone."

M. Night Shyamalan broke out in Hollywood with a provocative, spellbinding piece of horror history with 1999's The Sixth Sense. In the nine years since, critics, fans and Shyamalan himself have placed tough scrutiny on him recapturing that glory. The Happening finally stopped his descent in subsequently worse filmmaking, but because his last movie, Lady In The Water, was so flawed, he had hardly anywhere else to go but up. Small victory, but still plenty of problems.

The largest malfunction with The Happening is that it fails in what Shyamalan does best; creating engaging characters the audience can at least respect, and throwing them off with shock twists. However now, as his shock endings have become passe in the pop culture lexicon, Shyamalan is so terrified to make a bold move that The Happening just ends up being a somewhat pointless movie. It is a film that simply doesn't have much happen.

Mark Wahlberg plays Philadelphia high school science teacher Elliot Moore, who's having marital problems with Alma (Zooey Deschanel) when he and his fellow teachers, including math nerd and best friend Julian (John Leguizamo), find out New York City is under attack. More specifically, people are attacking themselves. When the confrontations spread locally, the three of them and Julian's daughter set off on a train to escape the cities. Soon, they eventually are forced to run on foot to get away.

Get away from what exactly? The marketing for the film did a good job to keep the evil forces of nature (no pun intended) wrapped up in secrecy. But the movie doesn't give us much to work with. Natural disaster? Terrorist attack? Government experiment gone wrong? There's no clear indication, only theories. That may work for certain movies that are engaging otherwise, but for a film that's mostly 90 minutes of people running around trying not to commit suicide, without a shock ending or any answers makes The Happening a cheated movie.

Almost all the characters are unlikeable. Wahlberg's Elliot tries to have a personality in the beginning of the movie, interacting with his students, but by the end he's as bland as the Pennsylvanian countryside. Deschanel's character is supposed to be emotionally unavailable, but she acts like she's mentally handicapped for 3/4 of the film. Leguizamo was the most interesting and believable of the main leads, but he's not in the movie enough to save it.

If anything in the film is considered a shock, it probably has to do with Spencer Breslin's (once an annoying child actor, now annoying teenager) character. Shyamalan tries to give a punch to the gut there like in The Mist. But by the time that "shock" happens, the whole thing feels kind of ridiculous. Sadly though, the end is as straightforward as can be, something that made the audience kind of confused. As in "Really? That's it?"

The Happening's whole premise is a good idea, give Shyamalan credit there. The entire discussion about evolution and natural selection and the effects we have on plants and the environment is an engaging one. It was trying to be a smart version of The Ruins, except the latter at least was effectively scary and entertaining.

But after the first few scenes, Shyamalan couldn't keep it effective. When the scariest thing about the film is wondering if the characters are going to be able to outrun wind, it's obvious the script looked better on paper. Actually, scratch that. The scariest thing was Betty Buckley as the old shut-in Mrs. Jones. What the hell was that all about?

Overall, The Happening wasn't a terrible movie; it didn't feel overly long and enough stuff took place that it wasn't completely boring either. But everything was adequate at best, and this film became probably one of the biggest non-entities in movie theatres I've ever seen. In the end we realized the only thing that truly 'happened' was that we didn't learn anything about anything, except that Shymalan could develop a sequel if he wanted to.

Let's pray "The Happening 2: It Happened Again" doesn't happen.