A fall from grace

Rating: 3/10 (23 June 2008)

There was real genius in M Night Shyamalan's first films Unbreakable & The Sixth Sense & Signs. These were all good films. They were entertaining, meaningful, and sometimes scary as hell, most importantly they explored the emotions & psyche of the characters. Then there came The Village which was a such disappointment to me, and Lady in the water which continued the downward fall. Those two films is where we see the chinks in the armor. Now we have The Happening, which looks like Shyamalan's biggest dud yet.
I at least understand what Shyamalan was getting at here. Like all his films there is a great Twilight Zone feel & tone which is both mysterious & eerie. He's also trying to make a meaningful statement about Global warming, Pollution, the green house effect, and society's overwhelming anxiety mass fear & paranoia in a post 9/11 world. Then the shock effect of seeing mass suicides, people seem to degrade mentally into mindless zombies then killing themselves. He does try to explain the phenomena, he does have a few points that this is an act of nature and science can only give theories about THE HAPPENING, there for the event may never truly be explained.
But really the film's attempts to be scary and comical are just so vain, and for a few stretches of the movie we borderline boredom. Problem was that the film started out with a bang and the suspense wasn't built up like in many of Shyamalan's films. The suspense wasn't there, when the Happening arrives we feel nothing, we aren't even sure what the hell's going on. The film was more confusing then it was scary. There isn't any reasonable nor scientific logic to why these people would kill themselves in such elaborate ways, as shocking as they are they don't make sense, why are they finding such clever ways of killing themselves? The suicides range from chilling to just over the top & funny. I mean some of the suicides were just comical. I think the idea he tried to put out was clever and somewhat original, but the execution is terrible. Don't get me started with the acting. Mark Wahlberg for most of the film has this "Deer caught in the headlights" look in his eyes, and his delivery of some of his lines made you wanna sigh. Zooey Daschel was equally misguided, there wasn't much chemistry between her & Whalberg in fact she was kinda annoying. When ever they say something meant to be funny we laugh at them not with them, just because of how stupid an awkward their lines were. Everyone in this film just seemed awkward, misguided and really just over the top.
In conclusion this wasn't entirely a bad idea but really the execution is the main problem. Bad acting, Poor dialouge, poorly developed story, lack of suspense, this movie was plain boring. I don't think this is the end for Mr. Shyamalan, but he really needs to get his head together, and remember what he did that originally got him where he is.