Click Here For Our Interview with Mark Wahlberg

The Happening

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

In January 2007, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan offered a script he'd been working on, called The Green Effect, to several studios. He was just coming off Lady in the Water, his first true box office failure, and wary of another one, all of the studios passed.

The last time a studio had expressed doubts, it was Disney, on Lady, and Shyamalan responded not by fixing the script but by taking the project to Warner Bros, who let him make it the way he wanted. But for The Green Effect, Shyamalan wasn't going to let his pride get in the way. Learning from his mistakes, this time he gathered up the notes the studios gave him and went home to rewrite. He returned a few months later with an improved script re-titled The Happening; Universal picked it up, Mark Wahlberg became attached, and here we are.

Perhaps that little story makes you optimistic about the chances of The Happening, which tells the story of a small family caught in the middle of a large-scale fatal phenomenon. Unfortunately, The Happening is the Shyamalan film you were dreading: a retread of some familiar ideas, only sloppier and less effective, it will further solidify the director's reputation as a one-trick pony who produces diminishing returns.

Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel star as a married couple who, like the couples in both The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, are having marital problems. This time, the "problems" are so pedestrian that half the time it's played for humor: she went out for dessert with another guy one night and feels guilty about it.

Wahlberg's character, a high school science teacher in Pennsylvania, is pulled out of class one day to be told that "an event is happening": something is causing people to become disoriented and kill themselves in NYC's Central Park. At first, everybody thinks it's a terrorist attack, but as the whatever-it-is spreads all down the East Coast, to smaller and smaller areas, soon there are lots of dead people outside. Wahlberg, Deschanel, and a few other survivors frantically run for cover, along with a cute kid (Ashlyn Sanchez), the daughter of another high school teacher played by John Leguizamo, who leaves her with Wahlberg to go find his wife in one of the infected areas.

None of this is particularly scary, though. I've always maintained that Shyamalan is a limited screenwriter but terrific at creating suspense. The Village is not a very good movie, but that scene in which Bryce Dallas Howard is alone in the woods, and blind, and then you see something behind her,