The Happening (2008)

Resources: IMDb * Wikipedia

Premise: Mysterious event killing humans. How will Marky Mark survive?

Directed by: M Night Shyamalan

Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo

Review: It's an M. Night Shyamalan film. Stylized heavily, it has his typical leaden atmosphere, and almost wooden performances from his actors. Wahlberg, who is great in unpretentious B-style movies like The Italian Job and Shooter, and Deschanel - ordinarily funny and invitingly cute and delightful in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Elf, seem to be wasted here. Leguizamo has a throwaway paycheck-style performance.

The plot itself centers on a neurotoxin emitted by plants that begins in the parks of major cities on the East Coast - which really makes very little sense considering the most threatened plants are in the rain forests, old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest and other invasive industrialized regions. Not only that, the neurotoxin makes people kill themselves, but for some reason makes them walk backwards prior to doing so. While it builds a little foreboding, it makes no sense considering this is supposed to be at least a pseudo-scientific film, given the science and news that drive the end of the piece. People escape the cities, only to be dropped off in the middle of small towns where more plants surround them. The wind - ordinarily driven by movement of air pushed by pressure centers and other atmospheric phenomena, not shuffling grass or branches - which carries the toxin seemingly tracks populations of people.

Miraculously, this "sudden evolution" or "defense mechanism" peters out when moving beyond the range dictated by Shyamalan's focus. So that too, makes no sense.

I understand the psychological effect the film was going for. I get the "live while you are alive and love one another" mechanism. But someone really needs to start editing Shyalaman and paying attention to whether his films are actually going to be more than a 2000's attempt to bring back director-driven psychodramas. He's not Hitchcock, even though he's trying desperately to be.

Overall: Bad