On Screen / Linda Cook

Movie review: 'The Happening' should never have happened

By Linda Cook | Friday, July 04, 2008 | () comments

Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel are shown in a scene from "The Happening." (20th Century Fox) Buy this Photo

“The Happening”

1/2 a star

Running time: 90 minutes.

Rated: R for suicide, scenes of death and blood.

Ouch.

“Lady in the Water” was a dud. And for its ghastliness, filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan took one to the chin. He got back up again, though, to make “The Happening.”

This one’s gonna hurt.

“The Happening” is an example of what happens when a good idea is inappropriately executed.

The show starts out all Stephen King-ish (a la “Cell: A Novel”) with people committing mass suicide in New York’s Central Park. Not far away, several members of a group of construction workers leap to their deaths almost simultaneously.

Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), a science teacher in Philadelphia, is talking about the sudden disappearance of honeybees. His friend Julian (John Leguizamo), along with Elliot and the other teachers, learn an apparent terrorist attack has happened in New York. They are told to dismiss school and try to get out of the city.

Julian, with his daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez) in tow, invites Elliot and his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) to head to the country. But while they’re standing at the train station, they hear rumors of terrorist attacks in other cities … or is it a virus?

The first half hour of the show is pretty interesting, even if it is reminiscent of “Gilligan’s Island” episodes in which everyone turns to “The Professor” for help. Shayamalan knows how to create tension and certainly gives us a few scares.

But what terror there is becomes lost in silliness and unintentional hilarity. Wahlberg has a preposterous monologue that drew hoots from the audience.

The acting is below-average but that’s probably because of the inane dialogue. People don’t talk to each other like this, especially not during a crisis — note the weird exchange between Elliot and Alma when he tells her about a cute pharmacist … just bizarre.

As for the character of the older woman at the end of the movie, I can’t begin to figure out what she was doing there or why she acts as she does. And that’s not to mention all sorts of red herrings and beginnings of plot threads that go nowhere, such as the train station at which all those aboard are forced to get off the train.

This is a cautionary tale that would have been worth telling with a different script.

As it is, this is a movie with the mental capacity of a houseplant.