The Happening (2008)
May 9th 2009 09:16 am
Where critics in the past have lambasted M. Night Shyamalan films I have stood against him and liked his films: The Village may have had a predictable twist but I still found it gripping and entertaining. Lady in the Water might have been a very strange and silly film but I remained gripped and terrified at times.
Now comes The Happening and the critics have been at him again. However, for the first time I have to agree with them. This was awful!
The basic plot is that people in North East America start killing themselves and a small band of survivors (centered around Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel) try and escape what is happening. At first it is thought to be a terrorist attack or maybe a government experiment gone wrong but the truth is far less scary!
There are a number of problems with this film:
1) I have never witnessed such wooden acting in a mainstream film before. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel can act because I have seen them in other things however you wouldn’t believe that if you saw this film. The delivery of some of the lines is laughable. I found myself cringing in some of the more “emotional” moments.
2) The “enemy” of the film had no threat whatsoever. Whenever people were attacked there was no sense of threat or danger. It just happened. The only real threat in the film was a crazy lady we meet nearer the end of the movie but that threat was over and finished with in no time at all.
3) You weren’t given time to care for the characters. Apparently there is some marriage problems between Mark and Zooey (I can’t remember their character names as I didn’t care enough about them to notice) however it is handled so badly by the director that I was never sure what was going on. An illicit dessert between Zooey and a man called Joey which happened before the film starts is the cause of some marital issues I think but it was all so unbelievable I didn’t care.
4) The director has forgotten how to direct! M. Night Shymalan films are normally full of fantastic camera shots however they are noteably absent from this. The closest he gets to his normal style is a couple of close up shots of faces where some incredibly bad acting is going on (Zooey, you are guilty of this on a numbeer of tearful occasions).
The only thing that stops this film from getting a lower score was that while it failed to engage with me it was very short and didn’t annoy me while I was watching it. Come on M. Night Shyamalan. You can do better than this!
[3/10]
