The Happening

written/directed by: M Night Shyamalan

1999 was an awesome year for movies. Fight Club, American Beauty, the Matrix, the Sixth Sense, and so on and so forth. ahh the Sixth Sense. brought to us by a young m night. with a twist ending nobody expected (except me because my friend janis chose to tell me about bruce willis's...condition...)

flash forward to now. 2008. m nights latest movie. The Happening. i had to convince sonja to go see it with me, even though after The Village she wasnt too happy with me or shymalan. but AMC has that $5 am movie deal so we went for it.

boy were we pissed. not as pissed as i was with the village. not as irritated as i was with signs. but there was something about this movie that did not sit right with me. all the elements were there. mark wahlberg. the suspense that is m night. the R rating. the bad ass trailer.

it just fell short of what it promised. i know trailers were meant to get you into the theater. to make you want to pay the $9.25 cost that movies go for these days. fight the crowds, waste your gas. all that. and i bought into it knowing this is what trailers are for and rarely has a movie every lived up to its trailer.

ok lets start from the top. there is an event happening in central park. a light breeze comes through. bam! construction workers are jumping off buildings. ladies are stabbing themselves with ponytail holder chopsticks. cops are using their firearms to blow their brains out.

"is it the terrorist" (using my dakota fanning circa War of the Worlds voice). who knows. skip to philadelphia (of course. this is a shymalan movie). we meet mark wahlberg. a dorky science teacher fascinated with some phenomenon of disappearing honey bees. apparently einstein thought that when the bees die, humans got about 4 years left of living on the planet. alright.

we meet his best friend (john leguizamo), his wife (zooey deschanel), and his best friends daughter (some little girl i dont think says 2 words the whole movie). they get scared and want to high tail it out of the city.

somewhere along the ride they learn that the "terrorist" hit a park in philly and sure enough people are offing themselves left and right. scary, no? oh but what ever could it be causing the mass suicides. theres no kool aid to be found!

anyway, as the day progresses, more and more people in smaller and smaller populations are dying. and its less and less likely its terrorist.

following? ok good. i dont want to go too more into it because then id give away the plot (no twist to be foiled) and i hate when that happens to me (see: aforementioned sixth sense incident)

ok plot out the way. the movie is just...just...i cant put my finger on it. i think it was a long long Go Green commercial. no there werent any toyota priuses or whole food stores or recycling bins (there was a cheesy iPhone placement though). but the message was just...got damn.

and the whole rated Rness. ive seen pg movies that were creepier. i did jump at one part and yes, people were killing themselves, but that coulda been portrayed with good editing and directing.

and the acting. it was just a cheesefest. and not in a good B movie sort of blantantly bad way. in just a bad way.

all in all id say skip it. let someone else whos seen it tell you what happened and save yourself the price of admission. just go home and re-watch the sixth sense if you want some suspense.