With such hype I expected disappointment, but not this much...

Rating: 1/10 (16 June 2008)

Considering M Night's initial track record of favorable critical reception and consumer interest, expectations were considerably high for this film. His first two films, Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, were refreshingly unique and were considered the start of a promising, and long, career in film creation, with some critics and industry notables dubbing him the next Hitchcock and even Spielberg. But now we can see with his diminishing box office success, and really rapidly declining favor with critics, beginning with Signs and gradually plummeting with The Village, Lady In The Water, and now this atrocity, that his comparison to those directors couldn't have been more far off.
The Happening is basically The Emperor's New Clothes of films. I honestly don't understand how anyone could have approved this script for a production when it is so poorly written. The critics who have come down on this movie have come down on it extremely harshly and deservedly as well.
This movie has so many shortcomings it's almost tough to list all of them: bad acting, plot-holes, defies laws of nature and physics, poor direction, anticlimactic, extremely preachy and obnoxiously politically loud, ultra-boring subplots, ridiculously clichÃ© and contrived characters, awful attempts at humor at several points, etc.
The only thing that was 'Happening' during the movie was many loud laughs and boos. During many of the scenes due to ridiculously poorly written dialog, people in the audience burst into laughter. I found it hard to laugh considering I was physically sick with disappointment. At the end of the film the entire theater erupted into boos sadly, and three people in front of me walked out about sixty-minutes into the film. The only reason I didn't walk out was because I was in a group of several people.
M Night has lost it clearly, and he shown no signs of getting it back either. Sixth Sense, I always thought it was a ripoff of the book 'A Stir Of Echoes' (written in 1958, later made into a movie Stir of Echoes starring Kevin Bacon) by Richard Matheson (legendary writer responsible for I Am Legend novel amongst others). M Night was accused of plagiarizing elements of 'Lost Boys' by Orson Scott Card as well for parts of Sixth Sense. With yet another movie under his belt that has tanked enormously and been slagged by critics, a movie that is seemingly all his own production, writing, and directing, I unfortunately have to come to the conclusion that unless he's heavily plagiarizing superior writing, he's up the creek without a paddle as far as making a decent film goes.