Review: The Happening

* 1/2

Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley. Written, produced and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Rated R. 90 minutes.

This review contains spoilers.

It’s been nearly ten years since M. Night Shyamalan became the international movie darling who brought The Sixth Sense, his deeply felt ghost story with its masterstroke denouement, to the world. And while the comic book mystery Unbreakable and the alien invasion tale Signs worked well enough on their own terms, the filmmaker hit some ballyhooed speed bumps with his last two outings, the forest preserve thriller The Village and the roundly despised fairy tale The Lady in the Water. The luster of Shyamalan’s early career has eluded him in recent movie outings, all of which he writes, produces and directs himself, cloaked in mystery sometimes until just before arriving at the multiplex.

And unfortunately, The Happening—his new film about a terrifying neuro-toxin forcing much of the Eastern seaboard to suicide—has more in common with his latter pictures, setting up a creepy premise before quickly unraveling into silliness, spotty performances and unintentional humor.

These flaws spell catastrophe for a film with a nature-takes-revenge premise that would have been more at home in the Greenhouse Effect B-movie cinema of the 70s, where films like Day of the Animals and Prophecy reigned. Thirty years of perspective has rendered those films all but enjoyable camp. Time won’t likely be so kind to Shyamalan’s deep-think warning.

The Happening sets up a frightening opening sequence in Central Park, where New Yorkers suddenly begin experiencing a sort of paralysis leading to mass suicide. An emotionless woman on a park bench promptly removes a hair pick only to stab herself in the neck. Construction workers plunge en masse to their deaths from dizzying heights. Initially thought to be a terrorist attack, no one is certain why this “happening” has occurred.

Meanwhile, New York City high school science teacher Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg) lectures his students about the elimination of the world’s bee population, concluding with a big question mark about nature’s unexplained mysteries—that “there are forces at work that we don’t understand.”

We learn that Elliott has an emotionally confused wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), who has been flirting with an affair, and a best friend in math teacher Julian (John Leguizamo), who also has a young daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez).

The group flees the city via train to Pennsylvania and hopefully away from the mysterious toxin, only to learn en route that the poison has gotten there first. By the time they begin to realize they are surrounded by the deadly gas, the train stops—and so does the picture.

Right here, the film begins to flounder and tension dissipates. The group separates as Julian goes searching for his wife, leaving his daughter in the care of the troubled couple who encounter an environmentally friendly couple (Frank Collision, Victoria Clark) convinced that plants have something to do with the strange events.

Two adolescent boys join the trio and they traipse through rural fields looking for a safe haven until science whiz Elliott surmises a goofy theory that the trees and plants are angry at our transgressions on the natural world. You see, they are striking back at us by emitted a defensive poison that is airborne on the breeze and can somehow sense larger groups of people, which apparently are more threatening. Yes, really.

In the first of many unintentionally funny scenes, Elliott explains this mumbo-jumbo to the group before they run for their lives—from the wind—in a sequence Shyamalan intends as suspense but plays as silly.

And it isn’t the only laughable moment that saps the fear factor out of The Happening. Later, a tense Elliott attempts to reason with a potted house tree, only to discover it is artificial. Then comes a scene where Elliott sings—off-key—to the inhabitants of a boarded up house, in an effort to prove the air outside is not poisoned.

The film comes completely undone with the arrival of a bizarre, reclusive character played by the great Betty Buckley. As the spinsterish Mrs. Jones, a farmhouse widow who lodges the trio of survivors, cut off from the rest of the world without radio or television, Shyamalan encourages the classy actress to indulge in shrieking outbursts and suspicious hysteria before ultimately mutilating herself in gory close-up. This junk is beneath an actress of her caliber, an obvious sign of desperation from a director using shock instead of awe.

The laughs don’t stop there—just listen to the exchange between Walhlberg and Buckley after she accuses the refugees of whispering. If her query isn’t funny enough, his reaction, in whining, nasally tones, is Razzie material if I’ve ever seen it.

Shyamalan can be an original, powerful filmmaker with the right actors and material—anyone remember Toni Collette’s car scene in The Sixth Sense, which garnered her an Oscar nod? How about the panic from everyman Mel Gibson while his house is under siege in the climax of Signs? He has an uncanny sense of how to scare an audience with eerie stillness and sudden reveals of light, shadow and surprise. But not here.

In his first R-rated picture, Shyamalan lays on the blood with bullet wounds to foreheads that spurt blood, jugular punctures, limbs torn by lions, a face smashing repeatedly into glass windows, a man devoured by a lawn mower, children blown away by shotguns and more.

There is no wonder here, just visceral jolts every fifteen minutes or so that don’t fuse with the film’s more thoughtful theme. Why, for example, would this toxin be forcing people to kill themselves, and in such gory fashion no less, rather than just poisoning them to sleep? Because the film would have no sense of fright without these easy shots.

There is negligible chemistry between mismatched Wahlberg and Deschanel, the radiant actress who has shone so brightly in films like All the Real Girls, Winter’s Passing, Bridge to Terabithia and others. Deschanel, a knockout here with piercing blue eyes and throaty voice, is offbeat as always and fails to connect with Wahlberg’s seriousness.

Along the way, many films come to mind from Day of the Animals to Impulse (1984) to The Mist to Time of the Wolf and many others. And while some may argue that the subject of The Happening is a frightening parable for our time and a companion piece to our current fascination with global warming, the inconvenient truth here is that The Happening is 89 minutes of tedium, a theme hung on transparent characters, cheap shocks and unintentional laughs.

Not recommended.

- Lee Shoquist