I held my faith in M. Night Shyamalan for as long as I could but I give up.

Rating: 4/10 (27 May 2009)

SIGH. I held my faith in M. Night Shyamalan for as long as I could but I give up. It's been like a downhill slide all the way. The Sixth Sense is one of my favorite movies; Unbreakable was intelligent; I still think Signs is cool; I even thought The Village was okay. Then came the WTF movie Lady in the Water. I didn't watch it because it didn't sound interesting to me, but everyone going "wtf" didn't exactly help persuade me otherwise.
And now, The Happening. This was supposed to be Shyamalan returning to form with a cool sci-fi thriller premise, but geez, it falls flat in so many ways that this might as well have been a Sci-fi channel original movie with generic director, screenwriter, and actors.
Omg, how miscast is this movie. Mark Wahlberg plays earnest so painfully that he comes across as a douche, all wide-eyed and speaking deliberately in a "hear how earnest I am" voice. Zooey Deschanel, in all her sprightliness, comes across more like Wahlberg's daughter than his wife. And John Leguizamo as a math nerd? Well actually he was good enough to pull it off, but the character and all his math-spouting just got annoying.
Like The Village, this movie starts off more intriguing than how it ends. Why were people killing themselves? And the frozen people? Quite classic. Then the reveal. Oh, it's... plants. I can buy the explanation, actually, even if it sounds like Al Gore produced the movie, but it just didn't make for a very good movie. I mean, the characters were just running from the wind. Not gusty tornado-type winds or anything, but just everyday wind-blowing-through-the-trees wind. I just couldn't feel the menace from the shots of trees. And geez, you'd think these people had never heard of SARS and how everyone took to wearing masks for fear of contracting something airborne. For fuck's sake, they don't even have the sense to hold their breath to go from one house to another.
SIGH. What a waste. There were moments of cool, like the various ways in which people killed themselves and Betty Buckley's insane but irrelevant old recluse, but the lameness is just overwhelming and unredeemable.