The Happening

Strike Three, M. Night, you're out.

The Happening is easily the worst film of Shyamalan's career. For all of it's jaw-dropping awfulness, Lady in the Water possesses a Herzogian obsession that's gripping to behold. Shyamalan created that film as a monument to his own ego, with a commitment so bold it's impossible not to admire a little. Lady in the Water is Shyamalan's cre de cour to every critic or studio exec with the temerity to doubt his genius. It says: "I WILL cast myself as a writer whose work will save the world! I AM so gifted a storyteller that I can devote half the film's running time to expository dialogue screeched in a Korean accent! I CAN base an entire film around a mythology that I completely made up, and expect the audience to immediately accept it!" The movie is a creation that bespeaks a will to power on the behalf of its maker that's awe inspiring, like the Pyramids or Auschwitz.

The Happening shows none of that lunatic vision: it's just inept. Literally every halfway effective visual in the film is in the commerical, from the chick sticking a hairpin in her neck to all the dudes jumping off of the roof to the guy laying in front of the lawnmower. And most of it's over in the first ten minutes. What's left is an hour and a half of Mark Wahlberg making like Fred Rogers on Methadone, leading his wife Zooey Deschanel and a little girl as they skulk around the Pennsylvania countryside, meeting wildly overacting rural characters and trying to outrun gusts of wind (really). The premise of a mysterious chemical causing people to spontaneously kill themselves is potentially interesting, but Shyamalan fails utterly to do anything interesting with it. Wahlberg and company don't know what's causing the attacks, and neither does the audience, but we do know that if it gets to the main characters, they'll die pretty much instantly, and the movie will be over. Since that can't happen, Shyamalan pads the middle part of the film with pseudo-suspense courtesy of the aforementioned overacting rural characters. Their presence is so transparently one dimensional (provide some sense of dread during part of the movie when here is no real chance that the deadly chemical will reach the protagonists), and their behavior so arbitrary, that they leave no impression at all.

One scene in particular fails miserably in its attempt at creating suspense, while at the same time highlighting Shyamalan's complete collapse as a film artist. In a direct reference to Shyamalan's most perfectly rendered piece of suspense filmmaking (the "Brazilian Birthday Party" video from Signs), a woman shows a crowd of onlookers a video someone e-mailed to her iphone (timely!). It's a dude committing suicide by walking into the lion enclosure at the Philadelphia zoo. The fact that this scene completely lacks every single element that made the original sequence from Signs compelling, and that Shyamalan seems to have no clue that it fails to meet these vital criteria, is the most eloquent evidence available that the man needs to find a new career. I suggest Subway sandwich artist.

Score: 1.8