What Happened?

Rating: 1/10 (20 December 2008)

Confession: I am an M. Night Shyamalan fan. I own The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, and Unbreakable and eagerly show them as masterings of writing and direction. I am also a Mark Wahlberg fan to a point. His character in The Departed could not have been better served by any other actor and his turn as an aging athlete in Invincible was both heartfelt and inspired.
Admission: I went in to this movie expecting it to be Mr. Shyamalan's return to greatness following the professional hiccup that was Lady In The Water. It was going to be yet another display of perfect storytelling, carried by a very capable lead actor, that I could add to my collection of Great Modern Movies. I had nothing but hope.
Admonishment: Stay clear of this movie. Don't even watch it as a rainy Sunday afternoon option to cure boredom. The direction is somewhat sound and the pacing is slightly above average, but what's going on IN each scene is absolutely negligible . Outside of one scene where a distraught construction worker watches his coworkers plunge to their deaths, there's not one redeemable moment in this movie. The acting level of every minor character is that of a high school educational movie troupe, the revelations of what is HAPPENING are spoon-fed and forced, and after 15 minutes I felt like I was stuck watching JUST ANOTHER DISASTER MOVIE. Worse, I didn't care to see what became of any of the cookie-cutter major characters: the loving wife, the honest friend, the goofy-science guy with the answers... they could have bit it in the first third of the movie and maybe, at best, I'd have woken up. Sure, John Leguiziamo is good and Zooey Deschanel is admirable in their respective roles, but when you don't care about whether they live or die you've gotta think there's a problem somewhere in the script. And as for Mark Wahlberg? Miscast. Seriously miscast. He spends his entire time here trying too hard to be the nice guy you just know he's not. The trivia page for this movie says that M. Night wrote the lead role specifically with Marky-Mark in mind. I don't know what he was thinking and I fear that his instincts may just be THAT FAR OFF. And that's a shame, because when his instincts were on we got Incredible Cinema. Now we get a dumb 1970's B Horror movie that I only finished because I hoped that somewhere, somehow, some SIGNS or SIXTH SENSE magic would show up. Here's a spoiler: it never does. Somebody get M. Night into therapy now (or at least a UCLA film class for a semester or three)to work out his issues and get his edge back because The Happening is the new Webster's Dictionary example of a LETDOWN and the second bomb in a row for a guy capable of SO much better.