More like The Crappening

Rating: 2/10 (31 March 2011)

Is M. Night Shyamalan, the director of this flop, the same M. Night Shyamalan who made THE SIXTH SENSE and UNBREAKABLE? You'd be forgiven for thinking that the director of the earlier, classy fare had been replaced by a talentless clone after watching this hugely embarrassing environmental-disaster thriller. It's a film which opens with a handful of breathtaking set-pieces involving mass human madness, before swiftly descending into the kind of silly schtick that even a Sci-Fi Channel producer would think twice before greenlighting.
The blame is clearly fixed on Shyamalan's shoulders; he didn't only direct this tripe, but wrote it too. That indicates that the production was a labour of love, but what a misguided one! The script is appallingly bad, full of the kind of unreal dialogue that could only exist in a bad B-movie, and the whole film has a tired, subdued, seen-it-all-before air to it. As for the cast...well, words fail me. Mark Wahlberg is wooden and hopelessly, helplessly, miscast as a science teacher, delivering his lines with a kind of disbelief that he's been caught up in this mess. Zooey Deschanel, who I previously saw in YES MAN (and to be fair she was quite appealing in that) is abhorrently awful, her wide-eyed style of acting more suited to a pantomime than a movie. The only one who gives a decent performance is the reliable John Leguizamo, and he doesn't get a great deal of screen time at all.
THE HAPPENING lurches from one minor set-piece to the next, always promising more than it delivers. The plotting is basic and obvious, never less than contrived. Some moments, like when the two boys start going crazy, are so over-the-top and badly done that they become hilarious to watch. So, in the end, that's what this becomes: a so-bad-it's-funny experience, a modern day variant on the likes of ROBOT MONSTER and PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. Maybe audiences fifty years down the line will feel the same way...