Chris Stover

M. Night Shyamalan has done it again.  At least, he tried.

That’s what you’ll feel once you see The Happening.  Although, if you’d like to keep a sane, reconciled mind, you might want to avoid any related feelings by not seeing the movie.

Many have said Shyamalan needed this movie to rebuild his reputation.  The sense the audience gets is that he tried to hard to do that.  Instead, the audience is left with under- and overacting on the parts of Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo.  In other words, it’s difficult to take the dialogue seriously, even though it’s sincerely meant to be sincere.

The movie begins in Central Park, where people mysteriously stop in their tracks and are overcome with the desire to kill themselves - visualized by construction workers jumping off buildings.  Next, we jump to Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, where people do the same.  A cop turns his gun on himself, and two others steal his gun to do the same.

And so on.  People blame a terrorist attack, but in reality, it’s the plants — at least we think.  At just more than an hour and a half, not much is resolved in the end, other than Shyamalan’s message that Mother Nature will turn on us if we keep treating her poorly.

So Wahlberg and his crew flee the city and aim for the countryside, where this mysterious suicide plague doesn’t seem to be occurring.  Meanwhile, we see two tweens get shot by a rifle and a man kill himself by lying in front of a moving lawnmower.  Yes, we literally see.

What Shyamalan conveys best is the suspense - those times when you know something’s about to happen, and even though you’re expecting it, it still makes you jump.  But that’s all the umph the movie had.  The ending leaves the audience with many unanswered questions - mostly how and why - therefore leaving an unsatisfied audience.

Seeing this movie in a Philadelphia theater made it more interesting.  At one point, a headline appears on the screen that simply says “Killadelphia.”  The audience, of course, laughed, but that’s probably unique to Philadelphia-area theaters.  But this added nothing to the movie — only took away.

Which brings me back to my original point.  Shyamalan is trying too hard.  If he keeps trying to push these movies out every two years, he’ll never meet the same success as The Sixth Sense.  Shyamalan gave no prescreenings of the film, not even to critics, which I think was a mistake.  I’d have liked to see the film without much of the gratuitous, disturbing violence.  I’d have liked to see some of the characters built more.  I’d have liked to see more resolutions throughout the movie.

Instead, we’re left with a sudden, unsatisfying ending that partially makes you feel bad for Shyamalan. And for the city of Philadelphia — that keeps getting a bad rep for continuing to be the bastion of bad movies by overzealous writer/producer/directors.