My Review Of "The Happening"

Ahoy, LLOCers! Spoilers ho!

I am a huge M. Night Shyamalan fan. Huge. The Sixth Sense? One of my all-time favorites. Unbreakable was good. Not quite my favorite genre, but good. Signs was excellent. The Village got panned by critics, and I was stupid and read a spoiler, but man, when she is wandering through those woods and you hear her father start talking about how the creatures were rumored to be real...I still have to watch with a cat held up in front of my face snorting into it (the cat purrs happily). And then I can't go outside at night for a while without seeing Noah in costume.
Lady In The Water was kind of lame. Fairly amusing and intriguing, but kind of lame. So when I found out about The Happening, the first R-rated film, I was thrilled. I have been waiting, what, two years for this? We got a babysitter. I put on red pumps half a size too small. We went out to dinner.

And we completely wasted fifteen bucks. What the HELL was that?

I am completely disappointed. Mark Wahlberg is a very tall 14-year-old boy. The dialogue between Mark and his coworker, Julian, is awful and awkward (and HELLO! If you are going to be doing extreme close ups on a 20-foot tall screen, BRUSH YOUR TEETH, JOHN LEGUIZAMO!!!) And you don't just pull a pin out of your hair and stab it into your neck like that. Which we got a full view of. I always appreciated the psychological aspect of MNS's movies. This has NOTHING. NO substance whatsoever. Just:
1 - People calmly walking off buildings and splatting onto pavement (dear friends of people left standing there)
2 - Woman stabbing herself through neck with hair pin, sitting beside close friend or sister
3 - Man holding arm out for lion to rip off. Holds out other arm for other lion to rip off.
4 - Police officer shooting self in head. Falls to ground. Blood begins to spurt out of head.
5 - Julian (come on, the characters we're close to? The man who left his already traumatized daughter, desperately trying to save his wife) calmly picking up a piece of car glass (left after the driver of the car slammed into a telephone pole, sending bodies shooting out of the car and landing with a thud) and digging it into himself.
6 - A woman screaming with horror and misery and panic as she tries unsuccessfully to prevent her young daughter from committing suicide over the phone
7 - Sounds of the group the main characters were with shooting themselves one by one, as a member of the current group points out that there were children with the other group
8 - A preteen boy, trying to man up and get food for the eight-year-old girl, get shot point blank, blood spurts everywhere. His friend then gets shot point-blank in the skull. In front of the eight-year-old.
9 - Eight-year-old listening to all the reports of people dying and realizing her parents, whom she could barely speak when not in their presence, have killed themselves, and collapsing into misery.
10 - Elderly woman slamming her head into the wall and through windows (we are lucky enough to be on the other side), glass embedded into her face and eyes, until she is dead. *TRY TO HOLD ON, MRS. JONES! THERE'S ONLY TWENTY MORE MINUTES LEFT OF THIS MOVIE!*

All of this is in full view of the camera. The deaths of children upset me the most.

Also? At one point Wahlberg tells the group to wait here while he checks a truck. And then he skips off across the meadows with his arms held out, holding his giant leather satchel. I will never take him seriously again after this. No more tightey whitey ogling for me.

The basic 'plot' of the movie - The plants are all mad because we have become a threat to the planet, so they start releasing neurotoxins into the air that flip our self-preservation sensors in the brain around and make us kill ourselves. As the 'event' gets stronger, it takes a smaller and smaller group to set the toxin off. You have to run and beat the wind. Or something.

Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel (who plays a sarcastic blonde trying not to fall in love with a sugar-hyped Will Ferrell MUCH better) emerge from their buildings to meet their death twenty minutes after the event has ended, and then Alma (Deschanel) is pregnant, Jess (said eight-year-old daughter of Julian), starts school again, and all is well. But then it starts again in France.

Only good part? Elliot (Wahlberg) turns around in an abandoned house to find a potted plant staring at him (trust me, it is. You can tell). Elliot starts talking to the plant, telling him they're just here to use the bathroon, they'll be on their way, please don't eat me, etc. Then he realizes it's fake.

I don't think I'll ever be watching this movie again (ok, maybe the skip through the meadow part, it made me titter). In fact, I don't think I'll be going to see any more MNS movies. Ugh. LAME.

I like saying that word, apparently. About this movie.
And that makes me very sad.
And that is also lame.

/gavel