The Happening: Day of the Triffids written by a five-year-old
The Happening: DVD Review
If you thought M Night Shyamalan couldn’t make a movie worse than Lady in the Water, or if you thought Mark Wahlberg couldn’t turn in a more risible performance than he did in Rockstar, then I’m here to tell you that you were plum wrong.
The Happening is a pompous, idiotic waste of celluloid that falls most definitely into the category: so bad it’s just plain bad. There has been a ‘Happening’, by which Shyamalan means plants are releasing airborne toxins that make people commit mass suicide. ‘Plants can talk to each other,’ someone with a beard explains. ‘Trees talk to bushes, bushes talk to grass.’ Imagine Day of the Triffids written by a five-year-old.
Wahlberg plays a science teacher (you can tell he’s a science teacher because he wears a tank top sweater), and, boy, is he bad? To be fair, he is woefully miscast, and is forced to deliver dialogue that would make George Lucas blush, but Wahlberg really is pushing hard for the much-contested accolade of Hollywood’s worst leading man. John Leguizamo and Zooey Deschanel (ruining the cred her recent indie-pop record afforded) also go down with this sinking ship. As for Shyamalan, who wrote and directed this gunk, his output has been in total freefall ever since the moment in Signs when the rubbish alien turned up.
The most annoying thing about The Happening is that Shyamalan clearly sees it as some sort of eco parable about us pesky humans getting our comeuppance for treating nature so horribly. It is such a cack-handed effort at persuading us to change our ways that it has precisely the opposite effect. So rev those engines, spray those aerosols, chuck your recyclables into a landfill. If we have to destroy the planet to stop M Night Shyamalan from making another rotten movie then that, good people of Earth, seems a very small price to pay.
