It’s an inconvenient truth: That “Sixth Sense” guy no longer makes good movies.
Director/writer/producer M. Night Shyamalan proves it again with his new environmental doomsday thriller “The Happening.” Originally titled “The Green Effect,” it’s a cautionary tale out of some kind of an Al Gore nightmare … a really slow, generic, poorly acted and ultimately stupid nightmare. It rounds out a trilogy of Shyamalan disappointments after his last two, “The Village” and “Lady in the Water.”
The movie’s marketing campaign, including the most recent TV ad, has been built around the concept that “The Happening” is the filmmaker’sfirst R-rated movie. This must be some kind of a perverse first, directly appealing to the prurient curiosity of moviegoers like this without apology.
But the “R” here is for ridiculous. The rating has no bearing on how provocatively adult or graphically violent the disaster movie turns out to be. The reason for the “R” is the premise.
Suddenly one Tuesday morning, people in Northeastern American cities and eventually smaller towns start killing themselves en masse. The narrative unfolds with a relentless succession of people evermore creatively impaling themselves, shooting themselves, hanging themselves and — in one case — literally throwing themselves to the lions (at the zoo).
Sounds like easy summer fun, no?
Mark Wahlberg plays a high school science teacher. His first scene shows him lecturing his students about a mysterious (and true) natural phenomenon: The honeybees are disappearing and no one knows why. Mother Nature is a wily witch, the script screams in this unsubtle prelude. So when the suicide pandemic comes and terrorists are blamed first for releasing some kind of neurotoxin, the audience already knows that it’s not terrorism.
That ruins the mystery “whatdunit” right away.
Thus, we must be invested in the story by rooting for the survival of Wahlberg’s character, his wife (Zooey Deschanel), his best friend (John Leguizamo) and the friend’s 8-year-old daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez). They escape from Philadelphia into the countryside to try and elude the death plague. But the script and the performances are so perfunctory; it’s hard to care about anyone during the journey, except for the little kid, of course. Shyamalan knows you can always use a cute moppet’s face to manipulate emotion when all else fails.
But even with that cheap trick and — weird guilty pleasure alert! — a grand-scale career-ender by Broadway legend Betty Buckley as a nutty old hermit, there’s nothing “Happening” here.
“The Happening”
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