‘The Happening’ or “The Crappening” (Review)
I’m an M. Night Shyamalan fan. I think he has detailed, intricate visions of what he wants his films to be and is also a talented and artful director. I thought this until I saw his most recent film, ‘The Happening’. It’s a rare experience to watch a movie that from start to finish is a complete failure on multiple levels and comes across an overall cringe-worthy experience.
M. Night is on the fast track to committing career suicide by releasing this movie, which is being advertised as “M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie.” This is a shameless ploy to get the horror buffs to see this movie in hopes of decent scene of gore and terror- oh… and there is none of that in this movie. ‘The Happening’ takes a potentially interesting premise and turns it into a laughable mess. This might just be one of the worst, hackneyed movies I’ve ever seen.
There is one reason why most people go to an M. Night Shyamalan film and we all know by now that it’s for the “twist ending.” There is a twist in ‘The Happening’ but it happens in the first twenty minutes of the movie and there isn’t any real plot development after that. The premise of the movie is that something is mysteriously causing people in the northeastern cities to start committing suicide in horrible and grisly ways. The real bulk of the story ends there. When the “twist” of the movie is revealed that it isn’t a terrorist attack but…wait for it…plants. Plants are making people kill themselves by emitting a chemical that in turn makes them take their own lives in horrifically violent ways. There you have it, call it a spoiler but honestly it’s really not since the “twist” of ‘The Happening’ has been online since last year. Many hoped that M. Night would change the twist or at least make it two-fold but that didn’t happen. There is barely a story in ‘The Happening’ but what is there is truly painful to watch. I actually started to think the reason people in the movie where killing themselves was because they had read the ending to the script and couldn’t wait for the movie to end. Yeah… it’s really that bad.
The movie follows the basic formula of the “impending disaster” film and has the cast of characters escape their surroundings and head to what they believe is safety (but is it?). Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), is a science teacher at a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania high school who flees the city with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and fellow teacher and friend Julian (John Leguizamo) in order to get to shelter outside the city. The thing is whenever a group of characters is trying to escape an impending threat you know that bad things are going to go down and they do. Of course there are various people they meet along the way and friends of theirs who fall victim to the plant menace. But not once does it ever seem like any of the main characters are in jeopardy of actually dying. In fact with so many awful things going on around them not once do any of the main characters stop to actually break down and get emotional about all of their friends or loved ones dying. For being an end of the world situation, every one remains surprising cool about everything which made me distanced even further from the film. If the bad lackluster acting doesn’t make you wince and say to yourself “wait…what?” then the asinine narrative surely will make you have a gut reaction to the fact that ‘The Happening’ is a bad film.
I wanted to love this movie. I wanted it to be a return to form for M. Night who has been floundering since ‘The Village’ signaled that maybe he wasn’t as talented and creative as we all desired him to be. After watching ‘The Happening’ (in which M. Night literarily phones in his performance) I felt insulted as a viewer of cinema. How can some one who made such great films as ‘The Sixth Sense’ and ‘Signs’ think that this movie was ready for public viewing. Technically the film has a beginning, middle and end but what truly could make this movie work and rise to greatness is not there. I would actually suggest people see ‘The Happening’ in order to have a new standard for “bad cinema” engrained into their minds.
Dan Hacker
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