The Happening

They told me not to go. They all did. The reviewers, my friends, my son. He texted as he left the theater in LA saying "Oh M. Night - please STOP! Just STOP!" We laughed. I thought "How bad can it be?"

I was looking forward to this movie for months so I was determined to see it. No matter what. Lady in the Water or not, I was going. After all, this is the brilliant man who created my beloved Signs and The Sixth Sense! Both ground breaking achievements. I can forgive him The Village and a few others.

And so we went.

Well at least now I know. All I can say is "M. Night - please STOP!!"

This is NOT a good movie. It's M. Night Shyamalan's first R rated movie, which means he has sunk to lower standards and is going for a bit of gore since the script is weak. The gore was pretty interesting, but nothing you didn't see last night on a Night of the Living Dead repeat.

Mark Wahlberg (Entourage) stars and you keep asking yourself throughout, "Why?" We grew tired of him almost immediately. He speak/whispers every line - he even shout/whispers and I so wanted to shake/slap him to get ANY kind of other sound to emerge from his body.

Basically people are being exposed to some strange gas that makes them become incoherent and then kill themselves. (It crossed my mind that the movie itself could be a mutation of the gas - the longer it went on I felt myself sinking into incoherence and most likely thoughts of ending it would have been next) Wahlberg is a science teacher for high school students, so of course it's logical that he's the only person who figures out what is causing the problem, how to stay away from it, and how to get himself and his wife to safety.

The plot is weak, the acting is overly odd. Even for M. Night. He doesn't even attempt real life - he has a crowd of people standing perfectly still, each one saying their lines as written. No two people ever talk at the same time. No one interrupts, no one makes a sound. People just stand and stare. They KNOW they don't have a line in this scene so they stare. These are not the people who have been exposed to the gas, either! They are the 'normal' ones! Just ridiculous.

One stand out performance - John Leguizamo (ER, The Kill Point) truly makes the most of every silly line and scene he is given. He does a great job with very little. Zooey Deschanel (Elf) is Mark Wahlberg's wife. She is cute but could have been nearly anybody in this one.

I hope someday that M. Night Shyamalan does a Behind The Scenes special where he bares it all and explains just truly what happened in between these movies. Did he start using drugs? Did he stop using drugs? Did his dog die? Wife leave him? Something must really have impacted his life to change his films so drastically. I keep hoping that the M. Night from Signs and Sixth Sense will return to us. In the words of Mel Gibson at the end of Signs - Come on, M. Night - SWING!

This one gets a 1.5