"Knight Thoughts" - exclusive web content
M. Night Shyamalan's latest starts promisingly and then goes downhill faster than an oncoming sirocco
Not Happening:
The Happening
6-13-08 "Knight Thoughts" web exclusive review
By Richard Knight, Jr.
I don’t know what happened to M. Night Shyamalan as he was writing The Happening.  Maybe he was infected with the airborne
toxin that makes people kill themselves in the film.  Or maybe he just forgot to check his common sense before he went outside
and started shooting the picture.  Whatever happened wasn’t good because
The Happening is his deadliest movie to date.  If
Shyamalan wanted to commit career suicide he couldn’t have chosen a more likely vehicle than this laugh inducing “thriller.”

As in all Shyamalan’s pictures the set up is scary and promising – an apparently airborne toxin strikes a group of New Yorkers
hurrying through Central Park on their way to work.  People freeze for a moment and then without hesitation kill themselves.  We
next follow Mark Wahlberg as a science teacher in Pennsylvania racing with his wife (a horribly miscast Zooey Deschanel) and other
terrified folks as they evacuate the city by train, trying to stay ahead of what appears to be a terrorist attack.  But not long after the
passengers are dropped off in the middle of nowhere, left to fend for themselves, the picture goes off the rails and never recovers.  

As the “happening” continues Shyamalan gives us more and more people resorting to a plethora of ways to graphically commit
suicide (hence the picture’s R rating) – they shoot themselves, hang themselves, stab themselves in the neck with broken pieces of
glass, smash their faces in windows, lie down in front of lawn mowers, drive their cars into trees.  By the time zookeepers are literally
throwing themselves to the lions one wants to toss Shyamalan’s movie into the den as well.

This loony film – which wastes Wahlberg, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley (in a bizarre, ludicrous sequence), and many other talented
actors – just gets sillier as the body count rises and the cast, making a leap of faith (a big one), are forced to speak Shyamalan’s tin
ear, high falutin’ dialogue and follow through on his crazy notions.  But
The Happening does have an upside – and it’s a big one.  This
howler is so bad it’s destined to join the ranks of recent camp classics like the remake of
The Wicker Man, Battlefield Earth, and Swept
Away
and provide future audiences hours of pleasurable laughter.  I eagerly await the DVD and anticipate a delightful screening party.