The Happening (2008)

He’s back. Did you miss him? No? Well, after Lady In The Water, I suppose you’d have a good reason not to miss director M. Night Shyamalan. But he’s back once more to scare audiences once again with The Happening. The Happening, man…it ain’t a remake of the 1960s hippies kidnap a mob boss movie, y’know what I’m saying, man? Instead it’s another creepfest about people who abruptly decide to start killing themselves in epidemic proportions. And while the opening scenes of newly afflicted people are very unsettling--the scenes of construction workers flinging themselves off of a building, and people taking turns to shoot themselves with a dead cop’s gun, are appropriately gripping--instead of a creepfest, The Happening turns out to be a major crapfest.

For one thing, Mark Wahlberg’s performance in this film has to be seen in order to be believed. Playing a Philadelphia science teacher, Wahlberg maintains this incredulous, "golly-gee-whiz" attitude throughout The Happening that is so hysterically ridiculous that you wonder if he was truly taking this turkey seriously when he shot this. Look for the scene where Wahlberg tries to convince a paranoid recluse that he and several others are not infected…by singing! That act alone would make me want to shoot him. And, to top it off, in another one of my favorite unintentionally funny moments, Wahlberg even tries to have a serious heart to heart conversation…with a plant. This scene was just surreal....

And as if Wahlberg’s performance isn’t off the wall enough, poor Zooey Deschanel (the younger sister of Bones star Emily Deschanel) looks so spaced out that she appeared to have been on some serious prescription medication. She came off as being so weird and unearthly in this film, that I began to suspect that she was the real cause of The Happening. John Leguizamo rounds out the cast as a really annoying math teacher who keeps trying to cheer people up by making them solve math problems while they're fighting for their lives (just the sort of guy you’d want to have around in a crisis, right?). He’s the perfect match for Wahlberg’s science teacher, who breaks into a geeky Mr. Science lecture whenever somebody asks him something.

And, to top it off, we get the big, not-so-scary revelation (spoilers to follow here). It’s the trees. The trees, apparently taking as much of us pesky humans as they could, released some sort of toxin in the air which makes people all freaky and screwed up. This actually happens in real life; it’s called pollen season, when millions of people (like me) suffer from bad allergies. Shyamalan must have been sneezing through a really bad allergy attack when he got the idea for this flick ("Wait! I got it! Killer trees! Yes, that’s it!!!"). The filmmakers try very hard to make gently swaying trees look very scary--and they fail miserably. But then, The Happening has already failed as a scary movie long before this moment. Perhaps it would have been better if Shyamalan had remade the orignal hippy Happening, instead of a film with killer trees, whose bark is worse than their bite. --SF

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