"Signs" had its flaws, "The Village" had a twist too easily found out, and "Lady In The Water" missed its mark. Thus, it shouldn't come as too much of a shock that "The Happening," M. Night Shyamalan's latest wannabe thriller, proves that the director once hailed as the next Steven Spielberg has lost his touch.
In an opening sequence worthy of an episode of "The Twilight Zone," the people in Central Park and the surrounding neighborhoods are struck by a strange and sudden epidemic that makes them freeze, stumble backwards, and then kill themselves by whatever means are at hand. Believing this to be a terrorist attack, officials order an evacuation of the city. High school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) grabs his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), his buddy Julian (John Leguizamo), and Julian's daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) and leaves the city on a train. The train soon "loses contact," stopping in a small town in Pennsylvania and leaving everyone to fend for themselves. The passengers and locals splinter into smaller groups as they try to outrun the compound that kills everyone in its path.
The jump to terrorism is too easy; the compound turns out to be a neurotoxin that blocks man's self-preservation instinct. However, it seems that if this was blocked, it would be more likely that people would begin to make unsafe decisions, such as driving without a seatbelt or eating something poisonous, that would result in a higher accidental death rate over time than killing themselves as soon as the instinct was inhibited. Unfortunately, Shyamalan is too busy throwing people off of buildings to address that question.
Pinned as the director of thrillers with a twist, Shyamalan has painted himself into a corner. The film's opening is intriguing and presents an interesting concept, just as most of Shyamalan's philosophically-charged pieces do. What would make so many people calmly kill themselves without reason? If only this quiet thriller was as elegant as some of his earlier works. Here, we are told what caused the epidemic early on in the film, releasing the tension elevated by confusion and allowing the remainder of the film to be an exercise in finding different ways to kill off characters. Perhaps "The Happening" is his way of getting back at those in Hollywood that thought him to be a golden child but abandoned him after his work grew stale, but the more likely explanation is that the film simply isn't good.
"The Happening," bearing an R rating for bloody violence, marks Shyamalan's first departure from the PG-13 rating. Targeting those bloodthirsty male moviegoers, the director is free to dispose of his film's population in strange and uncensored ways. "The Happening" aims to shock but doesn't earn the right. A toxin that makes affected people suicidal is creepy enough on its own, and Shyamalan could have made a more effective film by leaving some of the deaths up to the audiences' imagination. I frequently found myself covering my eyes, not because the film was shocking, but because I simply did not feel the need to watch one man feed himself to lions and another plant himself in front of a running lawnmower.
I wish I could say that "The Happening" was made at least partially watchable by the acting. Leading man Mark Wahlberg's Elliot is stilted and unnatural. Did the toxin invade the set and remove his acting capabilities? Too naive and childlike to be a leader, Elliot is not the man to save his fellow travelers. Wahlberg is not totally at fault for the character's ineffectiveness, however. The script given to him by Shyamalan is rough and frequently begs the question, "Who talks like that?" He is given one comic line that works, but overall Wahlberg's inherent charm is not enough to salvage the role. Zooey Deschanel, often quirky and undeniably cute, plays Alma as if she has just been woken up from a coma. She relies heavily on her big blue eyes but doesn't carry enough emotion to make her character of dissatisfied wife believable. Gone are the days in which Shyamalan commanded strong performances from his actors.
Most of the people the Moores encounter are crazy and odd in their own ways, making you doubt the toxin is the only thing in the air in the rural northeast. Elliot, Alma, and Jess are given a ride by an odd but friendly couple that own a plant nursery and pass up no opportunity to expound upon the virtues of hot dogs, and Betty Buckley appears as Mrs. Jones, the psychotic hermit who unwillingly offers the survivors a place to stay. Within thirty seconds of meeting her, it's no surprise that she lives alone.
Technically, "The Happening" is difficult to watch. The film feels unfinished and amateurish, not what is expected of a seasoned director like Shyamalan. By this point in his career, even if his stories are weak, his films should at least be assembled well. In this film, the camera is invasive, cutting to extreme close-ups of his characters' faces at every opportunity, a technique that would work well if his actors were showing any emotion. His desire to be on top of his actors results in choppy shot-reverse-shots that create an unsettling feeling of distance between the characters on screen. When Elliot questions the train conductors, they are never shown together, and the cuts back and forth make the dialogue feel mismatched. The horror is meant to be found in the shots of The Wind whistling through the trees, but that is as laughable as the bad dialogue and unpolished acting.
In the wake of films of worldwide destruction and epidemic, audiences deserve a better film than "The Happening." The only scary thing about this paranoid thriller is how unintentionally humorous it turned out to be. With no trigger point or examples of how the human race should change, "The Happening" presents a thought-provoking concept that quickly becomes buried under an empty and wandering argument for environmentalism. Trying to be too philosophical for a summer action movie but being too laughable to be taken seriously, "The Happening" is one more nail in the coffin labeled "Shyamalan's Career."