The Happening

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Rated R

But where Night Shyamalan goes wrong with The Happening is by purporting that it would somehow be a coordinated effort by all plant life, and that its revenge against mankind would involve a deadly airborne toxin emanating from plants that causes anyone it infects to kill themselves in brutal fashion.

That's just silly.

And unfortunately for Shyamalan, that's all he's got.

The Happening never begins to make more sense than it did when a woman stabs herself in the neck in the film's opening scene or when construction workers leap to their deaths from the tops of buildings in the next scene. We know that something's happening and that Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel will probably outrun it. Anything else - what the real cause is, why it starts happening, etc. - is not really Shyamalan's concern.

Once upon a time, this guy made effective thrillers. If you like Signs, you could argue he made three straight effective thrillers. If that's your argument, the scales are now balanced: The Happening is the third bad Shyamalan movie in a row, following The Village and Lady in the Water, and it's the worst of the three.

The acting is uniformly bad. Compare this with last year's The Mist, which, while not a great movie, at least had the proper amount of panic in each scene. The characters in that film didn't know what to do and their tension was palpable. That isn't the case in this rather nonchalant horror flick, which never heightens the anxiety and to make matters worse, throws in comic relief where it isn't needed or even wanted.

The idea is not fully formed, and the resolution is entirely too weak. There should be more of a reason to watch Wahlberg and Deschanel amble through the Pennsylvania countryside with no clear destination in mind. Perhaps Shyamalan should've made that point to himself while writing the script, which starts with the concept of man vs. nature - one of the five basic conflicts of dramatic storytelling - and never goes any further.

Instead of his patented trick endings, in The Happening, Night Shyamalan has no real ending at all.