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| HEY GUYS BE NICE TO THE PLANET |
Directed by: M. Night Shyamalan
Produced by: M. Night Shyamalan, Barry Mendel, Sam Mercer
Written by: M. Night Shyamalan
Budget: $48,000,000
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley
Elliot Moore (Wahlberg) is an unconvincing, wide-eyed high school science teacher with an equally wide-eyed, unconvincing wife Alma (Deschanel). When a mysterious neurotoxin starts making people kill themselves in droves, the pair takes on their friend Julian's (Leguizamo) daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) as they try to survive this strange...happening.
It's plants, which isn't much of a spoiler.
"The Happening" is not one of Shyamalan's better-remembered films, which isn't saying something considering his track record resembles a black diamond ski slope in quality. Shyamalan has always been open about how much Alfred Hitchcock influenced his own film making, and there's a lot of Hitchcock in this movie, but ultimately not enough to overcome the now-expected underwhelming Shyamalan slump.
Now, I don't outright hate Shyamalan like a lot of people seem to. He's a fine director, and "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" are really good. "Signs" was alright, and even "The Village" has its fans, for some reason. The problem comes when he's in control of most of a movie's production, similar to George Lucas on the prequels, and...man, "The Happening" was bad.
Please note that every time I use the word "happening" I am not trying to make a pun. It's just a side-effect of the cruddy title.
The Good
The movie actually starts out on a good note. Before we're even introduced to our main characters we have several scenes of nobodies killing themselves in various ways. One woman pierces her throat with a hair needle, a bunch of construction workers jump to their death, and a group of people pass around a cop's gun. These scenes are lies, because the minute they stop the movie slides more and more into ridiculous territory.
The construction worker scene at the start of the movie is by far the best scene in the movie. Cornell Womack actually puts in a good performance as a construction man who thinks his buddy's just fallen from the top of a site. Unfortunately he's not the main character.
The Bad
As you might have noticed above, I can't even really talk about this movie's good parts without bringing up how bad the rest of the movie is in comparison. While the early scenes are really well done the entire thing drops after the 23 minute mark, when we start getting information about what's actually happening. You can actually sense the cast giving up when we see the video of the tigers tearing a man's arms off.
The acting is hilariously bad almost entirely across the board. I don't mind Wahlberg when he's playing a meathead, but his performance as science teacher Elliot is so strikingly awful that I almost felt bad for him. In interviews he's mentioned that Shyamalan wanted Wahlberg to play someone different than his typical muscle-bro but he doesn't seem up to the task. His attempts to sound urgent are hard to describe, but it sounds like he's reading all of his lines sarcastically, which I don't think was intentional.
And then there's Dechanel. I feel like a large part of her performance can be chalked up to the fact that Alma has almost zero character development past teary-eyed worry, because she's not normally a bad actress. She was fine in...um...New Girl? She was in Elf, and she did alright in that. There were lines where I would just stare slack-jawed at her delivery, at the dialogue, at the framing. For reference, there is a character in the movie for about ten minutes total who gains more character from a speech about hotdogs than Alma does throughout the entire film.
Shyamalan obviously thinks he's the next Hitchcock, and that wasn't helped by times when people called him the next Spielberg. There's some major similarities between The Happening and Birdemic, and not just in the way that the stories are parallel environmental anvils. Both directors were massively influenced by Hitchcock and other directors of that time, but I feel like Shyamalan was good enough early on that it's gone to his head. It's only recently that his name's stopped being a punchline and people are giving him a lesser Affleck treatment.
Finally, there are scenes in the movie that are so absurd it makes me wonder whether Shyamalan didn't actually intend for this to be a comedy of some sort. Some noteworthy scenes include Mark Wahlberg talking to a plant, a group of people running away from the wind, and the bizarre framing, shots, and pans. There are multiple dialogue exchanges where each line has its own close-up shot without allowing the actor's full face in the shot. The effect is somewhat like shooting a movie through a wide-angle lens without any considering for what that would actually make the movie look like.
The Rest
Here's a drinking game I came up with:
One drink every time:
-Someone says "Event"
-Someone says "happening"
-Someone says "terrorist"
-Drink for the duration of any shot consisting solely of plant life
-Finish your drink any time someone talks to a plant.
Hard Mode: Drink every time Deschanel underacts.
Here is a link to Mark Wahlberg's best performance. Whaaaaat? Nooooooo.
Should You Watch it?
"The Happening" is a study in bad film-making. If you go into it looking for some comedic entertainment or as a look at how a once-adored director can fall so far, it's passable. If you go in expecting a legitimate thriller, turn it off once the train stops. As a drama this movie ends far better if you imagine everyone kills themselves rather than letting love conquer the plants.
If that sounds harsh, I did my job.
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