M. Night Shyamalan used to have a vast army of
fans. Now he has a dwindling network of apologists. The former frightmaster's
descent from wunderkind to embarrassment has been unusually dramatic and
public, thanks not only to the high-profile failures of The Village and Lady In The Water, but also to such bizarre,
backfiring ego-stroking endeavors as The Man Who Heard Voices, Michael Bamberger's fawning,
sycophantic account of the making of Lady In The Water, and the self-indulgent
faux-documentary The
Buried Secret Of M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan should be glad he makes movies primarily in
Pennsylvania instead of Hollywood, because under California's "three strikes"
law, he'd be facing hard time in movie jail thanks to his third consecutive
disaster, The
Happening.
A miscast Mark Wahlberg stars as a science
teacher whose soothing, almost hypnotic vocal patterns seem modeled on the
paternal purr of Mr. Rogers. Wahlberg's humdrum existence changes instantly
when the denizens of major cities and towns in the Northeast begin inexplicably
committing suicide en masse. Wahlberg flees to the countryside with wife Zooey
Deschanel to wait out the catastrophe; there, he encounters such colorful
characters as a plant-lover obsessed with hot dogs and a mean old spinster who
doesn't much cotton to city slickers eyeballing her "lemon drink."
The spectacularly ill-conceived, tension-free The Happening will have audiences on the
edge of the their seats, contemplating whether to bail out early or see
Shyamalan's latest grab-bag of ineptly executed bad ideas through to the bitter
end. The film confirms
that its creator's once vice-like grip on the public imagination and skillful,
borderline sadistic manipulation of audience emotions has given way to clammy,
flop-sweat-drenched flailing. With its focus on a nuclear family faced with a
sinister, enigmatic outside threat, The Happening suggests a remake of Signs with all the dread replaced
by great gales of unintentional laughter, most notably during an ostensibly
terrifying zoo-animal attack that might just be the funniest scene of the
summer. When the underlying cause of the widespread freakery becomes apparent
in a twist too idiotic to give away—think The Birds by way of Al Gore—the
film devolves even further into unintended camp. Shyamalan still has an
abundance of personality and ambition, and there are scattered moments of craft
throughout, but the gulf between his lofty aspirations and feeble
accomplishments has seldom been wider or more chuckle-inducing.