"The Happening" is Utter Hokum!

Rating: 4/10 (26 June 2008)

Since he made the ghost story movie "The Sixth Sense" with Bruce Willis back in 1999, writer & director M. Night Shyamalan has displayed a penchant for creating movies with paranoia, suspense, and surprises. "Unbreakable," Shyamalan's sophomore effort with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson, generated equal amounts of paranoia, suspense, and surprises, but nothing that topped "The Sixth Sense." Despite contrived scripting, Shyamalan's third epic "Signs," a science fiction saga about aliens invading Earth with Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix, illustrated him at his zenith for forging paranoia, suspense, and surprises. Shyamalan botched his fourth film "The Village," starring Sigourney Weaver, Joaquin Phoenix, and William Hurt. This xenophobic parable about a faction of people that isolates themselves from society lacked the supernatural elements of "The Sixth Sense," "Unbreakable," and "Signs." Shyamalan loves to spring surprises on his audience, but "The Village" felt like he had yanked the rug out from under moviegoers. An atrociously cheesy ending undercut its paranoia, suspense, and surprises. Shyamalan recovered with "Lady in the Water," a lightweight fantasy thriller about a misplaced water nymph from a bedtime story. She winds up stranded in a contemporary apartment complex swimming pool and the maintenance man (Paul Giamatti) has to solve riddles to get her safely back to her own kind. Whatever ground Shyamalan regained with "Lady in the Water," he has forfeited with his latest exercise in paranoia, suspense, and surprises in his new movie "The Happening" with Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo. "The Happening" is only a third as good as "Signs." "The Happening" unfolds in New York City at Central Park around 8 AM. Inexplicably, everybody in the park stops walking. Some begin to walk backwards after a moment. A girl on a park bench perusing a book pauses, pulls a metal pin out of her hair and plunges it into her throat. Less than an hour later, a worker hurls himself off a high-rise building under construction. As co-workers gather around his body, they glance up. More construction workers are diving to their deaths off the building. TV newscasts carry reports that an unknown airborne chemical virus has swept New York City and people are committing suicide. Authorities prepare to evacuate the Big Apple while they speculate about the source of the virus. Initially, they blame terrorists for the attack.
Meanwhile, Philadelphia high school scientist teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg of "Shooter") tells his class that honey bees have vanished without a trace. He asks them to account for this phenomenon. One student believes the disappearance of the honey bees is "an act of nature that we will never understand." Elliot agrees. Scientists will theorize about the loss of the honey bees, he asserts, but nobody will know conclusively why the bees went bye-bye. Writer & director M. Night Shyamalan has thus laid the ground work for "The Happening." Mysterious events nobody can explain jeopardize civilization. Like hundreds of other people, Elliot, his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel of "Elf"), his colleague Julian (John Leguizamo of "Spawn") and Julian's daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez of "Crash") catch an Amtrak passenger train leaving Philadelphia. The train halts in a small town because the train employees say that they "lost contact" and everybody is set afoot. Television news reports reveal that the deadly airborne virus has spread across entire northeast. About that time one of the evacuees that our heroes are fleeing with devises a theory for the virus that sounds like the ravings of a lunatic. Elliot, however, believes that man's theory and suggests that Alma and he separate from the main body of people.
"The Happening" develops loads of paranoia, suspense, and surprises during its first hour. Unfortunately, it blows it all for a revelation about the airborne virus that would make global warming champs cheer Shyamalan. Unless somebody has told you what triggered the apocalyptic virus which compels people to commit suicide, you will want to laugh out loud. "The Happening" is a horror movie with no tangible horror. Unlike like previous Shyamalan sagas, this sci-fi thriller has moments of gore and violence that drive home the lethal impact of the virus. Hollywood has made horror movies about virtually every known or unknown supernatural catastrophe that has threatened mankind, but "The Happening" has an invisible nemesis that you can only hear and then suspect the worst consequences. Shyamalan dissipates the suspense and paranoia suddenly when the virus loses potency without warning. "The Happening" qualifies as an inept B-movie horror thriller that refuses to divulge the source of its mystery because it has no answers.