Painful and hilarious

Rating: 2/10 (1 July 2008)

It was the plants, punishing us for polluting the planet. There, I just saved you from the most pointless 91 minutes of your life.
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
I really have trouble with M Night Shyamalan, firstly because I have real trouble spelling his name, and secondly because he is so inconsistent. His recent films have been either severely below par (eg. Lady In The Water) or average at best (eg. Signs) and he has turned from being a promising young writer/director into a provider of weak cinema. The obvious fact is that he got lucky with the Sixth Sense, followed it up brilliantly with Unbreakable, and then kept trying to write more elaborate twists and turns in his movies. He is still riding on the Sixth Sense's reputation as a classic, and hopefully the fact that The Happening was god awful will knock him down to earth and make him go back to the drawing board. This worked with him before, in the distinctly un-Shyamalany Stuart Little, so hopefully it will work again, and PERMANENTLY.
The Happening, which is by far the most unassuming title in the world, is about a an unexplained epidemic of suicides in built up areas of North East America. A school teacher attempts to flee this epidemic with his wife, colleague and colleague's daughter and hilarity ensues.
Yes. Hilarity. The mass suicide scenes are shot so badly that they are funny. Mass suicide made funny, and not intentionally. Great. I'm speaking generally, there are some scenes that are very well done, like the builders jumping from the scaffolding, but the others, especially the guy who tries to make a lion eat him, are awful. This said, there are three set pieces that are brilliant. I've mentioned the builders; the second is where the colleague drives with some other people into a town looking for his wife, and they are greeted by the sight of the town's inhabitants hanging from lampposts. Brilliant suspense is created, and a real sense of doom when they notice a hole in the roof, punctuated by the car being crashed into a tree. The old, crazy woman is brilliant too, and the scenes in her house were genuinely scary.
But what made this film so poor was the acting. Mark Wahlberg can act, The Departed, Boogie Nights, Four Brothers, they all prove it, so there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for a wooden performance that makes Hayden Christiensen look like Al Pacino. The sad thing is, in comparison to everyone else in The Happening, he is actually pretty good. Zooey Deschanel makes no effort, her part could have been filled by a corpse. John Leguizamo was very average, he had his good and bad moments, and the girl who played his daughter was similarly OK. Everyone else is instantly forgettable, except the aforementioned old crazy lady, who makes the last few scenes tension filled and gripping. The script the actors had to work with was boring, stale and... You know what, I'm not even going to go there. IMDb won't let me swear, and I can't talk about the script without using the dreaded "f".
The bad far outweighed the good. I left the cinema feeling like i would never get the time i had spent watching this sorry excuse for a film back. Don't watch it. It will only help Shyamalan get good again. Hopefully.