Title: The Happening
MPAA: R
Runtime: 91 minutes
Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

M. Night Shyamalan (first name: "Mid") has offered the viewing public a sled-load of steaming crap-cakes, and I would like to offer him a heartfelt "bite me." His latest offering, The Happening, is misleadingly titled; it probably should have been called The Not Happening, Ever. Better yet, it should have been called The Waiting, because that's what the viewer spends most of this film doing: waiting for something to (please, please, dear God) happen.

Let me see if I can summarize the plot, as I understood it by the end of the film:

- In Central Park, people are acting weird - in fact, they're killing themselves (probably in a desperate attempt to get out of being in this movie)
- Obviously, then, something seems to be happening, but no one is sure what it is
- Mark Wahlberg is a science teacher, who has a math teacher with a very large face for a friend, and together they intend to find out what is happening
- Incidents of Escape-the-Movie-by-Suicide begin to spread to the surrounding areas: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, etc.
- Mark Wahlberg does a lot of traveling with his wife, trying to escape from the movie. He also whines a lot while doing it.
- More suicides - really graphic, outlandish, sensational suicides, the details of which are not spared the audience in the slightest by the increasingly-weird M. Night Shyamalan
- Mark Wahlberg continues whining, running, and looking confused and helpless
- Vast amounts of film are wasted on scenes of discussion, in which various theories concerning the happening are explored at length
- More Wahlbergian whining and running, as the suicide rate skyrockets (my theory: the more Marky-Mark sniffles and hyperventilates, the less his traveling companions desire to live, and thus they throw themselves under running lawn mowers, shoot themselves, leap off of buildings, and so forth)
- Wahlberg and his space-eyed wife meet a freaky old farm lady, who must shoulder the very large burden of providing all of the suspense for the film
- The film ends with thinly-disguised commercial probably paid for by Greenpeace

Over the years, we've all come to expect the Shyamalian last-minute plot twists: The Sixth Sense (he's dead?!), Unbreakable (ahhh, he's the villain!), Signs (she wasn't losing her mind, she was predicting the future!), The Village (they're highly-cloistered freaks?! That's the explanation?!). Even Lady in the Water had its redeeming qualities, keeping the audience guessing about which character fit where in the puzzle of the fairy-tale's dramatis personae. The twist came when the script revealed that no one fit in quite where you expected.

But with The Happening, there is none of this. The mystery of the source of the ever-spreading suicides is basically revealed less than halfway into the film, and no plot twist comes along at the end to turn the viewer's world upside down and create that lovely feeling of disorientation. It just ... ends. With a lame save-the-planet lecture, no less.


So here's what you should do: send me the $7.50 you were going to spend on your ticket to see this film, and I'll give you the same content and message in a fraction of the time (so you can get right back to doing more important things, like finding ingenious uses for all that congealed bacon grease you've been saving in a coffee can under the sink). Here it is:

- Recycle
- Respect the Ozone
- Reduce your carbon footprint
- Stop chopping down trees
- Save the planet

There. And you didn't even have to put up with Mark Wahlberg whining and crying at you for 90 minutes. You can thank me later.

UPDATED

This movie was really, really bad. I saw the movie in the theater months ago, and I still have bruises. Therefore, it gives me great pleasure to announce the arrival of the one thing that might stand a chance against this steaming pile of ... well, you get my drift. I am referring, of course, to the RiffTrax audio commentary on The Never Did Manage to Actually Happen.



Get your mp3 download today, and be sure to add "Why're you eyeing my lemon drink?" to your arsenal of bad movie catch-phrases.