M. Night Shyamalan's latest effort looked to be the return to darker, more suspense filled territory after Lady In The Water drowned with critics and audiences alike.
Unfortunately while the premise suggests that in this film shit happens, we're unhappy to say that, while score one for pun usage, it turns out that Happening's shit.
The film starts with a creepy, paranoia-engorged scene out in open air as a whole community literally comes to a standstill for no apparent reason. This nerve-shredding scene culminates in a bit of a anticlimax (more on that later) which then quickly cuts to Marky Mark Wahlberg delivering some of the most thought-provoking, Oscar-worthy dialogue this side of the Mississippi: "Did you guys hear about the bees?" Brilliant.
The bee dialogue goes on for quite a while as Marky Mark does everything in his power to shrug off his macho exterior to try and come across as the sensitive, intellectual, schoolteacher everyman that we can root for; shirt and knitted vest combo, check! Replace gruff voice with a ball squeezing highpitched whine, check! The only things missing were some black rimmed glasses and a copy of Einstein's theory of relativity on his bookshelf (although there's no space for that, too many Sony products to stuff into the frame).
Mark is joined by the enemies of spell-check Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo, playing his distant wife and best friend respectively. The usually beautiful and youthful Zooey looks like shes been slapped by 10 years of aging since the last time we saw her on screen and does little more than open her eyes wide and point out the obvious – example: *Car pulls right up next to her and Mark* "Look, there's a car."
Leguizamo does no better as the so-called best friend who can't help but point out the faults in his best friend's marriage while, aside from avoiding an appropriate smash in the teeth, obviously having his own problems by being a shitty father.
Other characters come in and out of the equation, each being as stupid as the last with only a couple of teenage boys showing a little bit of personality (and we mean little), but they soon get put an end to in an unintentionally funny moment.
It's hard to spot who's to blame in this mess of a film. Is it M. Night Shyalalalaman for the terrible script? Is it the appalling acting? Or the marketing? One of the most annoying things about the film is the adult rated trailer released before the film's release. It featured every single death in the film but actually showed all the gore, which for some reason in the UK they cut out. This just screams as a marketing tactic just so they can release an uncut version of the film on DVD in time for Halloween to entice muppets to watch it again. It's such a cheap ploy and we expected better from a director who has made some great movies in the past.
The weird thing is, the stupidest thing about the film hasn't even been discussed yet! The main threat of The Happening is so ludicrous that we found ourselves laughing throughout the film at the sheer ridiculousness of the whole thing. One scene involves our batch of idiots running away from… The Wind! That's the terrible villain in this film, Mother Nature, and she's taking no prisoners – nobody's safe! You'll never look at a hanging basket the same after this film. To Shagalamb's favour he manages to build up suspense pretty much out of anything… a tree swing being a particularly eerie moment for some reason.
The film then runs out of steam in the third act as if M. Night had the sudden realisation that you can't outrun the wind or take a swing at it. So we get some creepy old lady to act as the manifestation of evil for the final act so the funky bunch can have somebody to actually react to.
We enjoyed The Happening for the wrong reasons – it was unintentionally hilarious as it became lost in a spiral of stupidity and as it came towards the end the whole audience in the cinema was laughing at the absurdity of what was before them. It's full of some of the worst performances we have seen and, although the direction is sharp, the script is a mess of good ideas mixed with the overwhelmingly bad ones.
If you have to watch this film then we feel sorry for you, but at least you'll leave the cinema laughing, or probably punch the first tree you see.
[story by David A. Scarborough]
David says
Agree that the ending was a little poor, but I found it all quite entertaining really. Dont become a media sheep, Hecklerspray!
Matthew Laidlow says
It has to be better then Kung Fu Panda though, doesn’t it? Is it worth paying £6 in the cinema or £2 for a knockoff DVD?
David Scarborough says
I can honestly say I’m not being a media sheep. One of my favourite films is Unbreakable and I walked in hoping that it was going to be a great, tense, eerie movie that the trailers promised it to be and I was utterly dissapointed. It wasn’t just me though, people I was with thought the very same thing! It’s a bad film. Period.
gir says
Come on , David, this is the internet. This is no place for calm, thoughtful defense of your research! Call that guy a fag and tell him his taste sucks and he ought to go back to watching late night phone sex commercials since plot, dialogue, character development, and story arc are concepts quite beyond his room-temperature IQ! I know you can do it. I believe in you.
ShyamalanFan says
It is one of the finest truely suspenseful/original/ gutsy movies in recent times. But i guess Shyamalan has gathered so much ill-will for himslef especially in the media that his name alone guarantees all these ‘experts’ shiting in their pants as soon as they see his name on the screen.
Gilbert Wham says
I don’t like this new style toolbar. It means retards can gussy up their angry screeds. It was better with HTML tags. I hate change.