YouSeenThat.com: Film Review
The Happening
by Jamie - July 9th 2008
“Move along. There’s nothing happening here.”
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I tend to take everything that I read on the Internet with a grain of salt, but given the steady stream of rumblings from the Internet crowd pronouncing that The Happening was pretty bad, I felt that I needed to take a look for myself. Could M. Night Shyamalan’s (The Sixth Sense, Signs) latest offering really be that awful? Okay, just for the record here, no, I’m not talking about ‘bad’ in the sense that 'it’s so bad that it’s good', just the fact that it was plain bad. Terrible. Rubbish. Bad in the sense that it would have almost been more entertaining to have paid someone thirteen bucks to roll-up a Thesaurus full of adjectives for the word ‘bad’ and jam it into your rectum at warp speed. Now normally I wouldn’t give the Average Joe’s opinion much weight, but the fact that The Happening had slipped to the Movie of the Week at my local cinema in the space of seven days, it gave some credence to what I had been hearing - The Happening just wasn’t happening.
For once, I’m in complete agreement with the Average Joe.
I’m not going to reveal too much of the plot, just on the off chance that you might actually want to see The Happening, but like most of Shyamalan’s films, the less you know about it going in the better. Okay, so here’s the basic setup: The Happening revolves around a family on the run from a largely unexplained natural disaster with the potential to cripple the continental United States – possibly even the entire world. The story opens in New York City, where we are soon alerted to the fact that an inordinate number of citizens appear to be topping themselves in bizarre and gruesome fashions. In typical Yank overreaction, fuelled by media hype, the nation suspects that they are in the midst of an advanced biological terrorist attack from enemy, or enemies unknown.
In all honesty, the premise for The Happening sounded reasonably interesting – akin to the sort of inventive horror fare that you might expect to see coming out Japan or Korea. Despite the fact that the theatrical trailers hinted at this film being another one of those ‘end of the world’ blockbusters that crop-up around this time every year, much to Shyamalan’s credit, the film doesn’t rely on clichéd explosions and ridiculous action setpieces to entertain. Instead, the meat of the film revolves around the random collection of characters and their relationships as they try and escape the chaos enveloping them. The protagonists (for a lack of a better word) will certainly act as a catalyst for some amusing/interesting debates once the credits roll. Come to think of it, this sounds like familiar territory. It’s been well publicised that the director is a devotee of Alfred Hitchcock – hmm, I can’t help but think that The Happening may be Shyamalan’s homage to Hitchcock’s The Birds… obviously minus the titular birds, oh, and the fact that The Happening was bloody terrible.
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As mentioned previously, The Happening doesn’t need to rely on expensive CGI effects or massive explosions to tell the story – it’s all about the characters and their journey. Now just about anyone with an IQ above twenty should be able to appreciate a character-driven story, but what happens when your characters are idiotic and unlikable? What happens when the very actors portraying those characters put in a performance that would rival a plank of wood… or, dare I say, maybe even Keanu Reeve’s on his best day?
I don’t know if Shyamalan was specifically going for a C-Grade horror movie feel, but from the woeful banter between two characters on a park bench in the opening scene, to the foreboding few last seconds of celluloid, I almost thought that I was watching some well-financed film student’s end-of-term project that had found its way onto the big screen. Think Italian Spiderman with a multi-million dollar budget.
The acting was absolutely woeful – preschool pageant woeful. I haven’t cringed that much during a film since Ed Norton stomped some black kids teeth into the gutter in American History X, nor have I been that embarrassed for another human being since Richard Simmons appeared on Whose Line Is It Anyway. The whole cast sucked. Period. While I’m not going to single-out anyone for a special mention, I was expecting a lot more from a line-up that contained the likes of Mark Wahlberg and John Leguizamo. I almost had the feeling that they were taking the piss… was this for real? Did they skim over the script, find out who/what the protagonists were and collectively decided to ham it up purely in protest? If you want ham, have Bruce Campbell on speed dial.
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If the pisspoor acting didn't kill all immersion in the story, the characters sure will. It’s hard enough trying to emotionally invest in the well-being of a bunch of clowns who can barely deliver their lines in any sort of credible fashion, but multiply that by a hundred when those characters are also complete morons. Their motivations. The idiotic crap that came out of these characters mouths. I'm going to lay the blame squarely at the feet of Shyamlan and his screenplay. Case in point, take the hippie plant nursery owner espousing the virtues of the humble American hotdog like the director was getting a kickback from the National Hotdog Foundation... oh, or what about the lone soldier doing his best Gomer Pyle impression. Christ, even Pyle wouldn't have been caught dead uttering the phrase "cheese and crackers" when the world is going to Hell in a handbasket.
After twenty minutes in, I couldn't give a toss as to whether these characters lived forever or died that very instant.
I’ve decided to keep this review relatively short and sweet - I was going to go on an atypical rant about how M. Night Shyamalan is the most overrated director working in Hollywood today, how his work is little more than a film student homage to Alfred Hitchcock films, and how he struck it lucky with The Sixth Sense… but meh, slamming Shyamlan is almost a national sport these days. After watching The Happening, I really can’t be bothered wasting any more time on this guy – the proof is in the pudding.
The A.D.D. Version:
The concept was interesting, however this character-driven film fails abysmally due to pantomime-like acting and absolutely idiotic characters. Not even worth renting.
Random Observations:
See This Film If You Like:
The YouSeenThat.Com Popcorn Rating:
If I wanted to pay money to watch C-Grade ham, I'd buy Evil Dead on DVD... again.
How does the YouSeenThat.Com Popcorn Rating work?
Well, it works on the theory that the more you enjoy a film, the less likely you are to be aimlessly shoving salty corn kernels into your gob, and a little more focused on what is happening in front of you on the big screen. Therefore, the more popcorn in our scorers bucket, the better the film. Pretty simple, huh?. Think of it as an inverse scoring system.