Summer Movie Suicide Mission No. 12: The Happening

In which one man attempts to view every summer blockbuster for the entire season, regardless of taste, genre, or OH MY GOD RUN AWAY M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN IS MAKING EVERYBODY KILL THEMSELVES!!!

I’ve been trying to think of an appropriate way to phrase my emotions about M. Night Shyamalan’s latest “thriller” The Happening, and I’ve decided to go with my original instinct, the five words that echoed through my head through the second half of the movie, the words that followed me into the parking lot after the show, the words that I keep repeating whenever I think about it — my mantra. I can say only this, and consider it a warning: What a piece of shit.

I instantly recognized that this was probably the worst movie that I’ve ever paid money for. Worse than anything else I’ve ever seen in a theater, worse than anything I’ve ever rented, worse than anything I’ve ever even seen a one legged homeless guy selling on the street. If my life were A Clockwork Orange, and I needed to be rehabilitated for all of my sins, they’d do well to pry my eyes open and make me watch The Happening on an endless loop. It’s a form of torture that hasn’t yet shown up in our secret offshore prisons, but it will soon enough. The Happening is the new waterboarding.

When it became apparent that the reviews for the film, Shyamalan’s seventh (!) feature, were going to be far less than complimentary, the director tried to embrace the shlock value of the picture he’d made, saying he hoped the audience would feel like they’d seen “a really good B movie.” I know B movies. I love B movies. But you, sir, have not made “a really good B movie.” Troma Pictures makes films with more art and class than The Happening. And they get better performances out of their actors, too.

Example number one is Mark Wahlberg’s abysmal turn as a Philadelphia science teacher (from Philadelphia High School, as obviously a city of several million has only one high school, which is named after the city) who spends the movie running away from an unexplained phenomenon that makes everyone in its path kill themselves, and attacks “smaller and smaller populations” as time wears on. I haven’t seen this much running without a legitimate explanation since Judgment Night. Which incidentally, marks another front-runner for worst movie I’ve ever seen. Wahlberg has turned in fine performances in movies like Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees, Boogie Nights, and The Departed, all of which were directed be real, professional directors like David O. Russell, P.T. Anderson, and Martin Scorsese. Those auteurs knew how to get a good performance out of Wahlberg, who was never really an actor by trade anyway. But when you see a star turn this poor from an actor with a pretty good track record, it has to be symptomatic of bad direction. Every one of Wahlberg’s line readings felt like it came from the first take, without any effort to work on the impact of his dialogue, which was intended to carry the movie and provide some sort of exposition to a plot that still remained somewhat of a mystery to the end. It didn’t help that Shyamalan had Wahlberg recite each of the steps in the scientific method. On two separate occasions.

Zooey Deschanel, who has a fine track record of her own, turned in a subpar performance, but didn’t need to do much to outshine Wahlberg. It’s a testament to how poorly this film was acted that John Leguizamo seemed like the most competent thespian on the screen. And Shyamalan killed him off halfway through. (Woops, spoiler!) Clearly, Shyamalan is not an actor’s director.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t block a shot to save his life either, and this was a plot that, despite its ridiculous turns (or dead ends, as was more often the case), was at least set up to provide some good visuals. It’s a shame that Shyamalan hasn’t ever heard of storyboarding. He seemed to take a “point and shoot” tack to most of the shots, without any planning. Look, here’s a guy getting run over by a lawnmower! Look, that driver’s gonna run right into a tree! Aim the camera over there!

The few more highly stylized sequences, like a scene where a police officer guns himself down and passers-by take turns using the officer’s weapon to do the same, are undermined by the willy-nilly nature of the scenes that surround them. The iconic image from the trailer in which several construction workers jump from a building is similarly minimized by the unnatural reactions that other characters have to the situation. Shyamalan’s misunderstanding of his characters, and of the way people actually talk and behave, ruins even his best moments.

Every time I see a trailer for a new Shyamalan movie, I always get a sense that it looks like this is the one that he’ll finally get right. And I get proven wrong time and time again. I won’t be the first to recommend that Shyamalan stick to cutting previews and leave the filmmaking to the grownups, and I certainly won’t be the last.

An added dimension to my disappointment comes from the fact that Shyamalan has become something like Philadelphia’s ambassador to Hollywood. He sets all his films in Southeastern Pennsylvania, if not in the city itself, and provides a boon to the local economy. As a native of the city, I’m continually embarrassed that the likes of Shyamalan are what passes for talent in my second-class town. While other cities are immortalized on screen in worthy, iconic films, we get Mannequin, National Treasure, and…this?

To paraphrase Roger Ebert (and the countless others who’ve paraphrased him), I hated hated hated this movie. I hate that the director decided to break his own formula of “twist endings” by shooting a movie that doesn’t have an ending at all. I hate that Shyamalan has forever ruined my impressions of Deschanel and Wahlberg, whom I’ve always liked in the past. I hate that he had the balls to refer to a movie with this kind of budget and distribution as a “B movie” just because he knew he’d made a piece of shit. I even hate the fact that this piece of shit made me laugh more than any other movie this year.

These were not the kind of laughs I ever want to have; these were evil laughs. Every part of this movie was deadly serious.

Mostly I hate that I had to watch the whole thing as part of this cruel summer science experiment I’ve created for myself. Maybe M. Night can remind me about the scientific method again.

If anyone has his e-mail address, forward this to him. If he reads enough bad clips maybe he’ll finally quit. That is, if he doesn’t keep making movies as a big “fuck you” to everyone. Which is what this feels like.

At any rate, M. Night Shyamalan movies are heretofore exempted from any future Summer Movie Suicide Missions. There’s no way I’m giving this motherfucker any more of my money.

Film: The Happening
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo

Viewing Situation: Weekday matinee, small crowd; standard projection
Rotten Tomatoes Average: 19%
My Grade (Out of 10): 0 (Congratulations, fuckface. You’re worse than Made of Honor.)

Next Up: Get Smart