The Happening Review

“(Insert ‘This Didn’t Happen’ pun here)”

M. Night Shylaman is a talented dude (What does the M stand for anyway?). Regardless, he’s gotten this reputation for being a total diva.  I guess I can see it, but I don’t particularly care.  His writing, in general has ranged from clever and masterful (Sixth Sense) to not good (Lady in the Water).  When the first pieces of The Happening started leaking onto the net, I was as interested in anyone else.  What ended up happening at 9:30pm the night of 6/13/08, was a force of nature.  A movie so bad, that I couldn’t find much right with at all.

This movie is not good.  At all.  The acting is so confusing, the writing so lost that I found myself laughing at the scary parts.  Clearly his attempt is at Hitchcock and he ends up at Wood (and not in the good sense either).  The movie is so laughably confused between it’s attempt at satire and horror, that I find it very hard to gravitate toward any portion of the film, character, plot or otherwise.

The imagery he has at some parts is actually pretty good.  He’s a very good visual director and certainly has very prevalent and haunting images.  Without a story, however, these images are hollow points of value.  The twist in the film is pretty lame as well.  The characters go from point to point without any real purpose or reason.  I found myself watching a movie about something that just didn’t make me care.

Overall, I think this is another failure for M.Night.  I don’t really have too much to say about the flick that’s positive so allow me to stop bashing it and assign it a Bone value of 2 out 10 for being a really boring, poor attempt at…something.

RATING: