The crappening

>>M. Night Shyamalan’s latest
fails to revive his flagging career

by MARK SLUTSKY

The filmic oeuvre of M. Night Shyamalan is not entirely defensible. Let’s just get that out of the way first. Having seen it very early in the game, before anyone, including myself, had heard of its famous twist ending, I enjoyed The Sixth Sense. For all its sappy piety, Signs had a few genuinely scary sequences. That’s all to say that the man is not a complete hack; he undeniably has some talent at creating suspense.

Or did, at least, because whether it’s an ego thing or what, Shyamalan’s movies went downhill and fast as of 2004’s preposterous The Village. Two years later, his Lady in the Water was a complete, self-indulgent joke featuring the director himself as a prophetic genius and an unintentionally hilarious subplot involving a mean old film critic who got his due. Plus, a much-publicized blow-up with Disney had the effect of painting the director in not the best light.

So expectations were not high for Shyamalan’s latest, The Happening, which arrives this week in a cloud of bad buzz, though, until I saw the movie, I wasn’t sure it wasn’t due to his terrible reputation alone. Maybe he’d keep his ego in check this time and crank out, as he promised in interviews, nothing more and nothing less than a solid, scary R-rated thriller.

Yeah… no. The Happening is a poor, poor excuse for a thriller. It is practically scare-less, and it features some of the worst writing and acting of Shyamalan’s career. It is, in its own way, astonishing.

Despite the title, the movie’s not about an experimental theatre piece (oh, that it were!). The film begins in Central Park, where random passersby begin to freak out, freeze in place awkwardly, and start to kill themselves in ghastly ways. Cut to Philadelphia, where science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), distant wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), buddy Julian (John Leguizamo) and his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) hear about the increasing number of deadly incidents and decide to get the heck out of Dodge.

As they travel into the countryside, they start to realize that what they’re facing isn’t a terrorist attack or airborne virus, it’s… okay, spoiler warning. I am going to spoil this movie’s one plot twist right after this sentence. It’s… plants! Earth’s plant population, pissed off at humans, is releasing a neurotoxin that makes people off themselves.

From a cinematic point of view, this means our protagonists are menaced by softly ruffling leaves, nicely-trimmed hedges, shimmering blades of grass. In one mind-boggling chase sequence, they run for their lives, pursued by a light, pleasant breeze.

You feel for the actors, who spend the entire movie saying things like “There appears to be an event occurring!” and “Something has been happening across various states!” and “What is occurring here?” Wahlberg can be great in the right role, but he out-blanks himself here, with far too many scenes of him staring off into space, looking pensive.

And with no visible enemy to outwit or outrun, the movie finally doesn’t so much climax as just peter out. While The Happening isn’t flamboyant in its narcissistic badness the same way Lady in the Water was, it’s an outright flop of its own kind, and further proof that Shyamalan really needs to stop writing his own scripts.

The Happening opens
this Friday, June 13

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