Shockingly inept in every facet

Rating: 3/10 (8 July 2008)

The Happening (2008, M. Night Shyamalan) It's been long-established that my experience is limited to one film pertaining to possibly the most infamous director of our generation, M. Night Shyamalan. He's a director that seems to inspire hyperbolic opinions in both directions, with The Sixth Sense being the only film of his that a solid majority of people seem to agree is any good (it's also the only film I've seen). But no one can decide 'masterpiece or 'disaster' for Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water...okay, maybe not Lady in the Water. Well, his newest film, The Happening, is another one to argue about.
The film, like all of Shyamalan's films, has an intriguing premise. For this one, it involves a mysterious airborne toxin of some sort that is making people kill themselves. The plot line follows a small group of people including a science teacher (Mark Wahlberg), his underdeveloped wife (Zooey Deschanel), his coworker, a math teacher (John Leguizamo), and a plant dude with a beard (An Actor Dude with a Beard).
Shyamalan's direction and editing is almost hysterically stiff. He seems to have absolutely no idea how to frame a shot, and he seems to cut to reaction shots at the most bizarre times, resulting in a visual style and rhythm so awkward that it literally elicited derisive laughter from me on several occasions. The acting is as poor as the direction, as the entire principal cast delivers their lines with such unsureness that they come off as thought this is the first time they've read the script (which is horrible anyway), with Mark Wahlberg giving one of the worst performances I've ever seen in the history of cinema. Outside of Boogie Nights, I've never been too impressed with Wahlberg as an actor, and I thought he was easily the worst part of The Departed (despite his baffling Oscar nomination), and here he gives as cringe-worthy a performance as you're ever likely to see. The rest of the cast from the usually marvelous Zooey Deschanal, to the usually solid John Leguizamo to literally every single minor character in the entire film.
The film does contain some interestingly-structured death scenes, including some nifty shots (the early shot with the construction workers plummeting on the building comes to mind) early on to set up the "terrorism", but even these are poorly-done, as his framing is amusingly prudish and stagey (the cop and cabbie shooting themselves in the head early on being the most egregious offender, as they brace themselves as they fall to the ground despite supposedly being dead, and of course the camera is within inches of them, making it all so upfront). Also, since these scenes only last half a minute or so, he supplants this hole with intolerable relationship trauma, as our main characters fill lots of screen time just bickering at each other, and by the time the woman in the Jeep with Leguizamo began screaming, the film turned from silly to obnoxious, and as we waste more time going over the same bullsh-t over and over, it went from obnoxious to interminable, and by the time they're getting threatened by crazy old ladies, it's just run off the rails and embedded itself in the ground.
Basically, it's like Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, except that all the actors suck, the director sucks, the movie sucks and instead of reanimated corpses that crave flesh, it's...plants. The film is so silly, so amusingly inept that it vaults itself over true intolerable badness like Diary of the Dead and Prom Night, and triumphs over In the Name of the King to win the Unintentional Comedy sweepstakes.
{Grade: 3.5/10 (D+/D) / #46 (of 53) of 2008}