Not Happening

Rating: 2/10 (14 June 2008)

The anticipation was astounding. My fellow film critic and I arrived at the Rave early to buy our tickets to ensure we'd actually get in before it sold out. The theater's manager wove in and out between the crowds, weeding out parent-less teenyboppers who were loitering, hoping for the chance to movie-hop into the film once it started.
Not that they would have missed much. After showing my ID and ticket stub to the usher who swiftly shoved us into the theater and directed us to seats of Everest proportions at the top of the nosebleed section due to the full house, I eagerly awaited for "The Happening" to begin.
I am sorry to say that it is my opinion that M. Night Shyamalan has lost his touch. Going from the groundbreaking The Sixth Sense (from which B horror films have continuously tried to copy its twist-ended style and have yet to succeed), the eerie, Hitchcock-like Signs, and the passable The Village (for the sake of this review we'll just skip over Unbreakable, as this writer sees both pros and cons of that particular film), the thirty-seven-year-old director has failed to impress this author with Lady in the Water, and now the utterly disappointing The Happening.
The movie itself falls so short of its expectations you can almost hear an audible thunk at the bottom of the Crappy Overrated Movie barrel. It is a movie where the audience later wonders why, exactly, it failed so immensely. After all, there were three acclaimed actors in the leadÂ—Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo. The director has been extolled for his previous films, as mentioned above. So what went wrong?
One could easily say without much thought, "Everything."
For starters, the acting was not only bad, it was nearly non-existent. It's as though somewhere between now and The Departed, Wahlberg forgot how to act. Deschanel's lines are delivered with the same life and intonation one might compare to Ben Stein, while it seemed that Leguizamo's character was caught somewhere between pre-pubescence and a two-dimensional octogenarian.
Not only is the acting bad, there was little to no character development, and the chemistry between the leads is something akin to adding water to water: Nothing happens. Perhaps, however, the acting can be given something of a minute reprieve by the acknowledgement of the fact that the plot is not only weak and unbelievable, but essentially non-existent. The movie is nothing but a string of Wahlberg, Leguizamo, and Deschanel running from place to place and witnessing Shyamalan's creative methods of killing yourself, all tied together in a 60's sitcom-tidy ending that left myself and my co-viewer in awe and anger that we actually spent $9.50 for such a lousy flick when we could've gone and seen The Incredible Hulk.
In short, this 'event happening' has been most un-eventful.