The Happening (2008)

The man with the oft-misspelled name, M. Night Shyamalan, hit huge with his directorial debut The Sixth Sense – and hasn’t been able to come near that success again. While Unbreakable was decent, his next 2 films (Signs (2002) and Village (2004)) were downright awful.

While his next film, Lady In The Water (2006) turned out to be a decent fairytale flick, we weren’t so sure if we wanted to risk going to theaters to check out his first R-rated film, The Happening. Toss in the fact that apparently M. Night had a hard time shopping the movie around, and ended up having to rewrite it before 20th Century Fox would even pick it up, it definitely wasn’t very high on our list of must-sees this past summer.

Once it came to DVD, well, that’s a different story. We figured it was worth the smaller monetary risk to watch it on the small screen, and added it to our Blockbuster® queue. Would The Happening turn out to be something not to be missed, or would we be glad we saved the big bucks and didn’t see it in theaters?

Mark Wahlberg, who started off by being very choosy with his roles, seems to have gotten less picky as the years have gone by. At first, he looked to have a plan with his films, but these days he just seems to be jumping on every bandwagon that comes his way.

Unfortunately, Wahlberg is utterly miscast in The Happening. He turns in one of the most awkward performances we’ve ever seen from him, and doesn’t even seem to have correctly interpreted his part in the film. True, his first scenes as a professor offer something fresh for the viewers, but these are quickly forgotten amongst the mess the film becomes – and right in the middle of it stands Wahlberg, trying to downplay the hero he recently has begun to be typecast as. Unfortunately, that downplaying comes across as mass confusion, and the viewer will never really connect to his character.

Zooey Deschanel, who seems to be popping up more and more these days, is also badly cast in The Happening. While she does manage to make her character more relatable to the audience (and those large eyes seem perfect for the horror-filled stare), her on-screen relationship with Wahlberg is just plain awful.

Wahlberg and Deschanel have absolutely no chemistry together, so their initial pairing as an estranged couple works rather better than expected. In fact, the estrangement between the two works so well, viewers won’t really want to see them together, despite the typical “horror makes the heart grow fonder” spiel of the film.

John Leguizamo puts in a performance in The Happening as well, but – like Wahlberg and Deschanel – his character is so thin he’s hard-pressed to make his performance worth anything in the time he has on-screen.

While a lot of Shyamalan’s visions have been disappointing in the past, they always had a seemingly solid storytelling backing them up. That’s not the case for The Happening. While the general idea behind the storyline seems to be solid (invisible killer on the loose), none of the characters are much more than cliched cardboard cutouts, and the whole film plays out as more disorienting and irritating than scary in the least.

That’s even with the R-rated effects included, some of which are rather gruesome. Unfortunately, those effects (including the disquieting man-serenely-lying-in-the-path-of-a-combine scene shown in the trailer) are largely wasted in this sloppily put-together film.

Despite an interesting premise, The Happening is easily Shyamalan’s worst movie to date – and shows a major decline for Shyamalan’s storytelling skills – something that has always given even his worst films a solid backbone.

With it’s cookie-cutter characters, utterly predicatable plot, and horrible performances from even the bit players in the film, The Happening isn’t worth the time it takes to watch on DVD.

Is this the best of what’s left of M. Night’s movie-making skills, or will he be able to turn viewers around with The Last Airbender? Honestly, after watching The Happening, I almost don’t want to know the answer.