Night couldn't stay ahead of the wind

Rating: 1/10 (4 December 2008)

Terrible. Terrible script, terrible direction, terrible acting.
Talented actors are shown as characters who alternately are zombies with blank faces and dead deliveries or idiots who somehow cannot manage to come up with an even half-sensible thought. Elliott's (Mark Wahlberg's) turn as the latter is BRUTAL - Shyamalan took a good actor, playing an apparently intelligent science teacher who's served as the guide for a group of toxin survivors, and made him into a blathering, stammering moron as the people he's leading press him to "do something" and he frantically begs them for "time to think."
Mrs. Jones (Betty Buckley) goes from an apparently sweet hermit lady into a raging lunatic in a second, cracking the hand of an 8-year old girl who reaches for a cookie set out as part of the meal that Mrs. Jones is serving. And the 8-year old, implausibly, doesn't cry, scream, protest, whimper, run off, or otherwise react in any way. She's EIGHT!
In terms of shooting, I appreciate that Zooey Deschanel has beautiful eyes. I get it. I really do. But I don't need to see them so close, so often, to the point that I think you're shooting through a fish-eye lens and if I look really close the next time the shot goes in, I can get a retinal print from her. When you shoot her like that, you so often make her look childlike that she BECOMES childlike. Which is really weird when she's married, talking about affairs, and ends up pregnant at the end.
And the dialogue.... If randomly dropping poorly-written and context-inappropriate exchanges into the middle of other circumstances is good writing, then "The Happening" may be "Citizen Kane." But I think it makes the characters seem like they have an attention-deficit issue.
I'll even go so far as to make a writing suggestion to Night Shyamalan: it doesn't matter if your movie is about plants releasing toxins to kill off chunks of humanity in self-protection; you still can't make a character tell others to outrun the wind, without making it sound ridiculous. Because it IS ridiculous.