Casual Cogitations

Mark Wahlberg stars as mild-mannered, high school science teacher Elliot Moore. While he's instructing his incredibly well-behaved and shockingly-science-happy class of inner city youth, he learns of some horrifying news: people in Central Park are killing themselves in exotic and gruesome ways.

He immediately grabs his wife Alma, his best pal and his pal's daughter, and heads for the first train out of NYC. Inexplicably, the train stops in Pennsylvania and our heroes are forced to depart and make their way across the middle of nowhere, while all around them a mysterious, airborne force is driving people to feed their arms to lions in the zoo and lie prone on the ground while a lawnmower chews them up. And I submit, by the time this ridiculous movie ends, you'll be hoping for your own lawnmower to come rolling through your living room.

I fired this bad boy up with the express intention of enjoying myself. And I sorta did, but probably not the way Shyamlan envisioned. Any amusement that I was able to squeeze out of this moronic affair was done solely at the expense of everyone involved.

First up is Wahlberg, he's an idiot…of profound proportions. He makes consistently bad decisions (you couldn't wait like ten minutes before the wind stopped blowing to walk out and hug your stupid wife?) and tends to miss obvious solutions to his problems (hey, how about driving that nice new 4x4 pickup truck, instead of spending the night with that crazy woman?). Of course that's his character, Elliot, doing all those stupid things, but thanks to some legendarily bad acting from Wahlberg, I'm having trouble separating the two personas. Really, everything you've heard about his line delivery is true. It's as if Shyamalan shot a bunch of takes and used the absolute worst and most awkward to put in his film. Or maybe it was like that improv game where a director pauses an actor and has him perform the same scene in a different, outrageous fashion like "Now do it as a drunk sailor!" or "Now as monkey that speaks French!" but Shyamalan was shouting to Wahlberg "Now read your lines like you're a fifth-grader doing a play about dental hygiene!"

Just as painful is Deschane who is reduced to merely big blue eyes and wispiness. Alma may or not be slightly mentally retarded—heck, Elliot might be fighting a losing battle with a chromosome himself—and Deschanel does little to steer men in any kind of direction. Apparently Elliot and Alma are in the middle of a rough patch of their marriage, but the cause of the tension is so inane—and gives rise to a surreal monologue by Elliot about cough syrup—that with all the talk about evolution and survival of the fittest in the film I'm dumbfounded that these two tools weren't the first to go.

Or maybe the plants simply saw no danger in their existence and actually considered their continued survival and eventual propagation a boon to their herbal mission of neutralizing the human race. Oh wait, I just gave away a whole lot, didn't I? But of course you knew that the villains in The Happening are ill-tempered plant life and their evil cohort, the wind. F—-ing wind! So yeah, plants have decided to fight back against human beings for screwing up the planet and have started farting out neurotoxins that makes them kill themselves; a fact that somehow manages to escape the combined intellect of the world's greatest botanists, but doesn't elude two yokels that own a greenhouse in rural Pennsylvania.

The cast is terrible. From struggling to deliver the clunky dialogue, to looking unsure of what, exactly, it is they're supposed to be doing: this is beyond awful. Shyamalan's direction is totally lacking in merit. Scenes that are supposed to elicit fear are laughable; tension is notable by its absence, and, due as much to his writing as his directing, the film lacks cohesion, with secondary characters dropping in and out of the story with total abandon and little purpose.

As ludicrous as the acting and story are, the most crippling component of The Happening is how lethally boring it is. The big action scenes involving characters running away from wind or talking to each other through an underground pipe. The closest the film gets to actual suspense is the very beginning, when the construction workers fall from the roof. But this is immediately followed by Mark Wahlberg opening his mouth and the onset of the nonsensical story. By the time Elliot pleads with a plastic plant to let his loved one take a leak in peace, we're through the looking glass, and the only hope for fun comes in more moments like it—bizarre setups designed to be deadly serious but only succeed in eliciting derisive laughter from the viewer. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on your capacity for intellectual self-abuse—there are plenty more to come.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

Somewhere, hidden beneath all the badness, is a message about man's total obliviousness as he heads down the path of destruction. At least I think there is, I wasn't really paying attention. Whatever you expect going into The Happening, it's way dumber. I think even Al Gore would agree with me on this one.