What just Happened?

Rating: 1/10 (19 June 2008)

I loved Sixth Sense. I think Unbreakable is the best "comic book" film ever made, and Signs still scares the crap out of me. I was left cold by The Village, but appreciated the artistry, and thought Lady in the Water was a magical fairytale, judged too harshly by cynics.
All that being said, I cannot believe the director of those films, the man heralded as "The new Spielberg", wrote and directed "The Happening".
It is possibly the worst film I have seen in 10 years. No kidding. The script is atrocious; reams of expositional, ridiculous dialogue and plot contrivances. Characters behave irrationally to move the plot along, and with no reason to care, their fate is of little interest.
The performances are almost uniformly embarrassing. Knowing that Whalberg can be good (see I *Heart* Huckabees), and that Deschanal has never been bad in anything makes it all the more unbelievable. Whalberg spends his time either frowning or wide eyed, often for not reason, and his high pitched voice, while intended to suggest a soft and gentle man, merely comes across as very camp. Only Leguizamo comes out of it with some credibility, but his part is severely underwritten, and ultimately pointless.
For a film vaunted as Shyamalan's first first R rated movie, the only genuine scare is because of a cheap music cue. There are numerous elements one assumes are meant to shock and scare but are unintentionally hilarious (running from the wind? running yourself over with a lawnmower?), whilst the intended humour falls flat (though I will admit to laughing once, when Wahlberg attempts to communicate with "them").
It felt like the film reached its end a third of the way through, and then kept going, with no conclusion. While M Night would argue that the film is an unapologetic homage to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", it played like the worst 50s B Movies you might see on "Mystery Science theatre 3000".
This is a "Battlefield: Earth" level disaster. I could not be more disappointed.