The Happening (2008)

Smith’s Verdict: *1/2

Reviewed by Tanner Smith

I hate to pick on M. Night Shyamalan. I really do. His successful 1999 thriller “The Sixth Sense” is a masterpiece in my eyes. I really like his follow-up thrillers “Unbreakable” and “Signs,” and I find “The Village” to be quite underrated. But as “Lady in the Water” declared his downfall as a filmmaker by just trying too hard to make a complicated, laughable story into something even more so in execution, this is also proven in the follow-up to that film, “The Happening.” For those who thought “Lady in the Water” was inept, “The Happening” is even more so. It’s strange (not in a good way) and just laughably bad.

This is one of the stupidest apocalyptic thrillers I’ve ever seen. See if you follow this—it begins as some sort of neurotoxin hits several people in New York, causing them to freeze in time, take a few steps backward, and then ultimately kill themselves.

Richard Roeper put this best, by the way—“Something wicked this way comes, and when it does, you die.”

Anyway, this airborne silent-invisible killer spreads from city to city. It’s posted by the media as a terrorist attack, but (get this) there’s a different theory that maybe nature has something to do with it, that it’s extremely ticked off at society and has found a way to communicate through the trees in order to spread a toxin in the air that will destroy all of humanity.

Yeah, that’s silly enough. It’s even more laughable as the heroes we follow in “The Happening” actually talk to the trees and plants in an attempt to soothe them and spare their lives.

Our heroes are a high-school science teacher, Elliot (Mark Wahlberg); his emotionally withdrawn wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel, keeping her eyes as wide as she possibly can); Elliot’s best friend, Julian (John Leguizamo); and Julian’s young daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). They leave the city of Philadelphia by train after news of the attack, but then are stranded in a rural area where they must…outrun the wind?

Yep, they outrun the wind and find shelter easily. And get this—they never stay in one spot and hole up! They keep going from place to place without having the intelligence to just hide in one location and wait out the storm. These characters are too dumb for a slasher-movie, let alone a disaster-movie.

The atmosphere is practically nonexistent. There’s hardly a sense of menace in the air (so to speak), so it’s hard to fear for the characters when the threat is near. And characterization is even worse—it’s stilted and forced, and the dialogue doesn’t help either. Speaking of which, say this line without cracking up (I dare you)—“Don’t take my daughter’s hand unless you mean it!” I don’t know about you, but that line kills me.

What was M. Night Shyamalan trying to pull off here? An environmental message within an apocalyptic thriller? Well, if he can’t make trees or plants seem ominous or threatening, there’s hardly anything that can be worth recommending for “The Happening.”