The Happening

Cast of Characters:
Elliot Moore – Mark Wahlberg
Alma Moore – Zooey Deschanel
Julian – John Leguizamo
Mrs. Jones – Betty Buckley

Director – M. Night Shyamalan
Writer – M. Night Shyamalan
Producer – M. Night Shyamalan, Sam Mercer & Barry Mendel
Distributor – 20th Century Fox
Running Time – 90 minutes
Rated R for violent and disturbing images.

A disturbing epidemic has begun in New York City’s Central Park with people committing mass suicide. Initially believed to be a bio-terrorist attack using airborne neurotoxins, the behavior soon spreads all throughout the northeastern United States. Upon hearing of the attacks, Philadelphia science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) leaves with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), friend and colleague Julian (John Leguizamo) and Julian’s daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) to search for any safe, uncontaminated area before the inexplicable and unstoppable threat to humanity catches them.

And make no mistake… it’s coming.

…

Yep, it’s definitely coming.

…

Any time now.

…

It’s taking a little longer than usual, but when it reveals itself – boy, is this planet in for it!

…

Fuck.

There was a time when filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan made great movies, and then something happened. Something horrific. Something truly tragic. Something extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile.

The Happening happened.

It makes you kill yourself. Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more evil that could be invented.

Oops, my bad. I meant, “It makes you KIIIILL YOOOOUR-self. Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more EEEEEEEE-vil that could be in-VEN-ted.”

I think I just figured out exactly what that mysterious, unstoppable force is: the stench of failure.

Contrary to what some believe, Shyamalan isn’t a one-hit wonder. At the start of his career, we got the Oscar-nominated Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and The Village, the latter of which I still defend, despite its rather divisive reception. More recently, within the past decade, he’s earned a second act that’s still been fairly well received, even if it hasn’t reached the heights of his first handful of films. The Visit, Glass, Old and Trap are imperfect yet thrilling efforts. Split and Knock at the Cabin are both legitimately great, with the former (along with Glass) helping turn Unbreakable from a singular fan favorite to a mini-multiverse trilogy.

And then there’s this near-decade long period in between those two career chapters that I like to refer to as Shyamalan’s “Dark Ages”. That’s when we got The Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender and the Will Smith family bait-and-switch After Earth. While not a good film by any stretch, The Lady in the Water was far from his worst. Lack of ambition was definitely not one of its faults, but one could argue over-ambition was. What didn’t help was Shyamalan casting himself as the film’s world-saving screenwriter, a pat on the back so self-congratulatory he might as well have named his character Jesus Christ. That was the start of the Sham-Hammer’s decline, but he was just getting warmed up, ’cause that decline was about to swan dive right off a cliff with his LSD fairy tale, The Happening, a film that would take ineptitude to record heights and remain to this day his worst film.

And believe me, beating out The Last Airbender is no small feat.

What went wrong here? Not just wrong, but horribly wrong. Abysmally wrong. Catastrophically wrong. Damnable offense wrong. Is this supposed to be a comedy or a serious, thought-provoking disaster drama? Were each of Mark Wahlberg’s lines punctuated with a hundred question marks? Should Zooey Deschanel have been tested for crystal meth before each day on set? At the end of the day, I don’t know. Many others don’t know. The movie sure as hell doesn’t know. I don’t even think Shyamalan knows.

Initially, Shamalamadingdong was hyping up the fear factor for his film, stating that he witnessed test audiences leaving theaters trembling. That I don’t doubt for a second, but not for the reasons Shyamalan was hoping for. Those viewers were most likely leaving theaters trembling at the sobering thought of knowing they’ll never live in a world where The Happening doesn’t exist, and that money they contributed to its box office is gone forever. But, of course, once the rest of the world caught a good whiff of that smell, Mr. ShamWow quickly changed his tune with statements like, “People missed the point entirely.”, “I was going for a campy B-movie feel.”, and “It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.”

Honestly, I haven’t seen backpedaling that desperate since the T-800 high-tailed it in reverse out of the hospital parking garage with the T-1000 in hot pursuit after Sarah and John Connor.

Give Shyamalan his due, though, ’cause he’s accomplished things in this film that I don’t think any other filmmaker has been able to do, chief among them being turning suicide into a laugh-riot and drawing out an atrocious, cocaine-eyed performance from the immensely charming and so gosh-darn adorable Deschanel. She’s not alone, however. Normally known for playing confident badasses, a woefully miscast Wahlberg couldn’t look any more confused than he does here. Forgive him for the wooden acting. It’s hard to get any dialogue out when your face is stuck in a perma-frozen “What the fuck am I currently doing with my life?” stare.

Playing a science teacher clearly doesn’t work here, but I guess that didn’t stop Paramount from thinking Wahlberg could authentically pass for a literature professor in their remake of The Gambler. That said, if the Academy created a category for Best Brow-Furrowing, Wahlberg’s amusingly perplexed performance here would win in a record-shattering landslide.

Succession fans will also be pleased to see Jeremy Strong pop up in one of his first roles as a neurotic soldier. Well, that is until they actually see his performance, which I’m convinced came about from him watching Deschanel and thinking, “This bitch ain’t crazy enough, so I’m cranking it to eleven.” Strong, of course, is known for his intensely immersive acting technique called “identity diffusion”, which is actually just a more pretentious way of describing yourself being extremely difficult to work with. This is the same man, after all, who begged Aaron Sorkin to literally tear gas him for a protest scene in The Trial of the Chicago 7, to which Sorkin wisely declined out of respect for the other cast members in that scene who were probably thinking, “This mother fucker asked you do to WHAT?!?!?!?!”

So knowing that, one has to wonder if he begged Shyamalan to please let him shoot himself point blank in the head… You know… ’cause it’s about becoming one with the character, or some other bull shit like that.

“My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting? It’s so much easier than being an insufferable dickbag.” – Laurence Olivier… more or less.

Reportedly, Wahlberg and Deschanel made a similar request to Shyamalan. Not out of any need to immerse themselves into character, but simply ’cause that’s the only way they felt they could bow out of this shit-show without breaching contract.

But with all that said, why keep beating a dead horse with this film? Why not glean something positive from it? I mean, you just never know if and when your ficus plant is going to kill you.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Surviving Cryptic, Toxin-Induced Mass Suicide:

1) Seriously, guys, take an interest in science.

• By doing so, you’ll be able to catch the dopey “twist” ending that’s pretty much spelled out by the students at the beginning.
• Mark Wahlberg will break yah fuckin’ nose if yah don’t, yah fuckin’ little snake, lace-curtain mothah fuckah you… Say hi to yah mothah fah me!

2) If you find yourself in great distress, rattle off some OCD probability stats. “62%… There’s a 62% chance we make it out of this alive.” There’s a 0% chance this film will make any more sense, and a whopping 100% chance it’s only gonna suck more and more as it continues to play out.

3) Hot dogs. Hot dogs. Hot dogs. They’re pivotal to your survival. It’s just a damn shame that with their cool shape (????) and all that protein packed in them that they still get a bad rap (????????????????). Maybe that’s ’cause they’re made of rat’s ass, but who gives a rat’s ass ’cause they taste good.

4) Be scientific, douchebag. Identify the variables. Design the experiment. Careful observation. Measurements. Interpret the experimental pattern. IT’S THE PLANTS!!!! Understand, right? Smoke a fat blunt first and it might become a little clearer.

5) Oak trees hate it when you swing on them. You’d know that if your little ignorant prick self took an interest in science like Wahlberg’s been telling you to do.

6) In the event you find yourself in a life-threatening situation that requires you to identify yourself, follow this quick. three-step procedure.

• Take a deep breath.
• Count to ten.
• Sing hit Doobie Brothers songs out of key.

7) If Step #6 fails, have the kids tagging along with you – the ones who are eerily calm about the fact that their families are either separated from them or dead – shout obscene insults at the occupants until they’re shotgun blasted clear off the porch.

8) Look out, here comes the wind! QUICK, COVER THE HOT DOGS!!!!

9) Don’t steal things from old ladies, and don’t you dare murder them in their sleep. They don’t like that.

10) Don’t put any stock in mood rings. They’re full of shit. Had poor, highly-allergic Thomas J. Sennett known that he wouldn’t have gone out of his way to track down Vada Sultenfuss’s ring in the midst of that swarm of bees, and they’d be living happily ever after to this very day. But that’s not happening now… ’cause he’s dead.

11) When it’s all said and done, and those evil plants randomly decide enough’s enough with kicking humanity’s ass, be sure to fill up your new home with as many potted plants as you can. You know, all those botanical assholes that have been causing everyone to kill themselves? Yeah, them.

12) Once all steps have been completed, you may now bask in the glory of Shyamalan as he bestows his omniscience upon the world. Consider it a privilege to be bludgeoned to death by his sanctimonious sledge hammer as he heavy-handedly tells us how much we all suck, and preaches the gospel of some eco-crap.

I do wanna call out one person and one person only and that is Betty Buckley, who is no stranger to the horror genre. Long before she was worried Mark Wahlberg would murder her in her sleep, she was Miss Collins, the kindhearted teacher who was worried one socially awkward, and terrifyingly telekinetic outcast girl would murder her entire school in Brian De Palma’s horror classic Carrie.

To Buckley’s credit, she seems to be the only one involved here, and I truly can’t stress that enough, that understands the assignment and completely leans into the utter bugfuckery of it all with this movie. She swings for the fences with her gung-ho performance and connects big time; however, her potential grand slam is caught at the wall by the fact that literally. everyone. else. plays it super earnestly like they’re in a deadly serious disaster thriller.

Much like oil and water, bleach and ammonia (keep it away from Jeremy Strong) or mullets and sensible fashion, Buckley’s spirited, bat-shit work running head-on into the over-seriousness of pretty much everything else is a clusterfuck collision of wildly disparate tones akin to a mega asteroid hurtling straight toward Earth at a punishing, unstoppable speed and ultimately destroying all life as we know it upon impact.

Just as The Happening did to the poor souls of every viewer that witnessed it.

Judgment: There’s a blink and you’ll miss it glimmer of potential to The Happening, but it disappears into a bottomless pit of incoherence, inept execution and hot dogs. Lots and lots and lots of hot dogs. It’s obvious Shyamalan’s going for a Hitchcock vibe with his “fear of the unknown” angle, but between the ludicrous plot and befuddled performances, combined with the over-seriousness from both, it all adds up to one of the most unintentionally hilarious films of the past decade.

I may not see dead people, but at one point, I did see a career on life support.

Sentence: Death penalty, Prisoner’s choice…

• Lethal injection: not by way of plant toxins, but by way of something far more toxic… Shyamalan’s ego.
• Asphyxiation: not from the lifetime all-you-can-eat hot dog eating contest you’ve been sentenced to, but from the dialogue Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel have been forced to choked down throughout this entire film.
• Being murdered in your sleep.

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