Mark Wahlberg’s performance in this film makes Jake Lloyd’s acting in The Phantom Menace seem Oscar worthy by comparison. All the actors in this movie give shockingly bad performances.

The premise for the movie was good. It’s an interesting concept.

Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel enhance the movie by being in it…but the dialogue was questionable. It was definitely B quality, especially with the acting ability of the supporting characters.

I still like M. Night Shyamalan. He is a creative genius. He just should have spent a bit more time on this one.

i laughed so hard at this stupid f*cking movie. best worst movie since wicker man. its that bad

I told myself that I was done with M. Night after watching Lady in the Water, but he fooled me again with the previews for The Happening. I figured hey, they at least got Marky Mark so it can’t be all bad right? Ah man, I was wrong. The plot is ridiculous and the dialog is laughable. I would watch Lady in the Water 5 times in a row before watching The Happening again. Never again will M. get my $8.50.

it was alright. better than anything else playing at the time, i’m sure.

I always try to see Shyamalan films in the theater because, well, I respect him for sticking to his particular thing, even if it sometimes (recently, often) doesn’t work. And I just like a parable. Signs and Unbreakable are my two favorite Shyamalan films. Anyway, Ebert liked this one. And the New York Times didn’t completely dismiss it. Alas, this just didn’t hold together. I liked what the New Yorker said though, about what it really needed was Val Lewton to come along and fix ‘er up.

On the way back home from watching this movie, I called my ex-boyfriend who informed me that he got my hilarious voicemail that I’d left two hours prior. When I asked him what he was talking about, he dictated it back to me: “I’m going to go see The Happening. Hope it doesn’t suck.”

This complete hatred of M. Night Shyamalan kind of mystifies me. Everyone loved The Sixth Sense, then Signs did really well, then The Village didn’t, then Lady in the Water really didn’t, and now The Happening looks like it’s going to do about the same.

Personally, I really enjoyed Lady in the Water, despite it’s negative critical reception. When I looked up The Happening on Rotten Tomatoes and saw the meager 11% rating, I looked at what Rober Ebert said. He gave the film three stars out of four, acknowledging that he was probably going to be in the minority. That was enough for me to go see it. Love me some Ebert.

Shyamalan himself compared The Happening to The Birds, which I think was a mistake. I can see why he chose it: the “villain” in The Happening, like in The Birds, is something that is constantly around us and that we have no control of. But wow, does any director really want to compare himself to Hitchcock? Ever?

I suppose it’s fitting, given Shyamalan’s hubris, that the biggest problem I have with the film is the directing. The premise is strong, if not a little kooky. The cast is good – Mark Wahlberg is quickly becoming one of my favorite actors, John Leguizamo did well with what little he was given, and while Zooey Deschanel feels like she’s really reaching in places, she shines in others.

The first real false note happened pretty early in the film, in a diner. One woman has a horrific video sent to her phone – an iPhone, of course, thank you product placement – and she shows it to Wahlberg. The man in the video is about to do something horrific when the person filming seemingly drops the camera. Everything gets shaky and dark. In my mind, this is the perfect place to end things. You know what’s about to happen to the man. Once you start using your imagination, however, whoever was filming picks up the camera and you see him meet his horrific end. Now my friend and I often joke about the jazz adage It’s the notes you don’t play, but it applies here. The footage is cartoonish. A lot of fuss has been made about this being Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie, but if you ask me, what made his prior thrillers so effective is the suggestion of violence, not the display of it.

Another thing I have a problem with is his use of slow motion, which I think is equivalent to the exclamation point in fiction. One is fine, two is okay, but any more than that and you’re really pushing it. The first time he uses it, it’s only for a few seconds and it announces the fate of a character minutes and scenes before anything actually happens. The second time it feels like he’s trying to put extra emphasis on a tragedy that’s already pretty over the top. I think it would have been a stronger film if he had kept everything rolling at the same pace.

Finally, I felt the film was a little preachy. There’s a point where all the characters seek temporary shelter in a model home in a subdivision. When they hike out of the area, there’s a billboard advertisement for the place. At the top, the ad reads, “You deserve this!” That sort of attitude permeates the film, really, and that gets to me because when I pay $9.50 for a movie ticket, I don’t want to be taught a lesson.

Oddly, the first thing this reminded me of is Hitchcock’s Psycho, which ends twice. Once, when the events of the film are resolved, and a second time, after a little psychology lesson. I can understand Hitch’s footnote-esque ending – 1960’s film audiences were not as sophisticated as today’s are. Without the psychiatrist character to explain Norman Bates, the audience would have been lost. But this is 2008, and I think the average person can grasp the message of this film without having it screamed at them by an actor playing a scientist on a television channel a character in a movie is watching.