suicidal failure for shyamalan

Rating: 1/10 (19 March 2011)

Disaster movie (in more ways than one).
People start committing suicide in New York, as if it were a plague. The authorities decide to evacuate the city... You only have to read those first two sentences to realise that you're heading into Turkey Land, into big-time garbage, into 'Is it the director and the writers and the producer and the actors who decided to blow their brains out, not the characters?' Wouldn't there be real chaos in your city or town if people suddenly decided to commit suicide for no reason whatsoever? I mean REAL CHAOS -crowds of people running for it, people getting drunk, people heading for church, looting, murders, blood, body parts... All you see in the mistitled HAPPENING is some people getting calmly into a train (there were even a few empty seats!) and - wait for it - heading off for Pittsburgh.
Mark 'I, like the director, have lost my mind' Dahlberg is a science teacher. Well, OK, it's not exactly typecasting, but he COULD be a teacher, with those irritating frown marks of his. Could it be that people are committing suicide because of 'a terrorist attack'? A TERRORIST ATTACK!? That's right, the (fill in your least favourite terrorist group) have concocted some 'toxin' that drives people crazy. The first 'attack' is in New York, so people head west. Dahlberg suggests it might not be a terrorist attack at all, but the side effects of something in the air. A bio-weapon that's gone astray? ('The Andromeda Strain') Something in the water? ('The Crazies') A mad scientist who's stolen a bio-weapon? ('The Satan Bug') No, it could be just something that's borne in the air. Turns out it's in the wind. So whenever the wind gets up again, they all scarper. 'They' are the group with Dahlberg.
Dahlberg is pretty dim, even for a science teacher. His wife, though, is dimmer still and makes him look like Einstein. Even when he IS having a conversation with a plastic plant. This priceless scene isn't amusing, just embarrassing.
Shyamalan is a director who is prone to sickly sentimentalism - and there are great lumps of it here. The last third or so of the film looks like bits left over from another script altogether - the kindly old lady who turns out to be like Kathy Bates in 'Misery.' It doesn't make much sense when slotted (very uncomfortably) together with the rest of the film. But since the film itself makes no sense anyway, what difference does it make? The deadly spores or whatever they are disperse. The shots of a scientist being interviewed on TV are sheer comedy. They're looking at a graph of the spread of the spores - no flashy graphics or anything, just a crude chart that belongs to Seventies TV. For not the first time, I seriously wondered whether THE HAPPENING was supposed to be a spoof - or even an elaborate conspiracy by everyone else in the country to drive Mark Wahlberg crazy. The ending is dreadful, along with the rest of it. Oh dear.