The Happening
“What the hell is going on?” asks one of the characters in the new end-of-days thriller, The Happening. It’s a good question and one I’d like to pose to the film’s writer/director, one M.Night Shyamalan, a former Boy Wonder turned Hollywood outcast.
It’s hard to believe that the same filmmaker who crafted the exceptional blockbuster The Sixth Sense also made this tone-deaf, horribly acted and laughably silly piece of hokum. I kept expecting Shyamalan to pop up onscreen at some point and inform the audience that they were watching an elaborate practical joke and that the real film would be starting momentarily. Unfortunately that cameo never came (in fact, Shyamalan doesn’t appear in The Happening at all, which is a first for the guy since he’s played a role in every film he’s made to date) and I continued to sit there as The Happening grew dumber and dumber and dumber. The plot, if you care, spans a particularly bad day in the life of an ordinary married couple Elliot and Alma Moore (Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel), who are forced to flee their modest Philadelphia home after a mysterious airborne toxin sweeps along the East Coast, causing people to kill themselves in creative ways. It eventually emerges that…wait for it…plants are responsible for this wave of mass suicides. That’s right folks–apparently Planet Earth has gotten fed up with our wasteful ways and is using the environment to strike back at us. It’s an interesting premise for a doomsday thriller, but Shyamalan botches it from the get-go, thanks to sloppy directing and truly horrendous dialogue. Here are some sample lines from this Oscar-nominated writer’s screenplay:
“She’s on a bus to New Jersey–she’s headed to the town of Princeton.”
“We ate tiramisu together. That was it. I told you that would be it!”
“Do you like hot dogs? They get a bad rap–they’re actually full of proteins.”
“Elliot’s resilient.”/”Yeah, he never gives up.”
Now picture these stilted sentences being delivered by normally reliable actors who haven’t been given any direction as to the kind of tone they’re supposed to be aiming for. What you end up with is a lot of healingly bad dialogue delivered in the most awkward manner possible. Wahlberg bears the brunt of Shyamalan’s apparent disinterest in talking to his cast. Never a great actor, the former rapper can still turn in strong performances as long as his director keeps him on a short leash. With The Happening, Wahlberg is left to sink or swim entirely on his own and you can tell the poor guy is completely flummoxed by the script he’s been handed. He reaches his nadir in a scene that requires him to talk to a plastic potted plant. I’m not joking. Meanwhile, his co-star Deschanel deals with the situation by staring longingly off-camera, as if she’s plotting her escape. I also felt sorry for John Leguizamo, who plays Elliot’s mathematician pal and, especially, theater legend Betty Buckley, who is forced to play an elderly recluse who looks and sounds an awful lot like the Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons. If you’re at all tempted to pay for the movie just to see what plot twist Shyamalan has come up with this time around, it’s important that you know that the twist of the movie is that there is no twist. Bad stuff happens and then it stops and you wonder why you just wasted $12 and 91 minutes of your life. This is one happening you should avoid at all costs.
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The Incredible Hulk
As one of the few critics out there who actually liked Ang Lee’s whacked-out take on the popular Marvel Comics character, The Incredible Hulk, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this rebooted version, which hews much more closely to the original comic book and the ’70s TV-series. And having seen it, I can honestly say that I’d watch Lee’s Hulk a dozen more times before sitting through The Incredible Hulk again. It’s not that this new Hulk is terrible–it’s not, especially compared to The Happening–it’s just tedious. Director Louis Leterrier beefs up the action quotient considerably, but he and screenwriter Zak Penn haven’t been able to come up with a story worth telling. Essentially structured as a chase movie, the plot picks up with Dr. Bruce Banner in hiding in Brazil, where he’s trying to learn how to control his inner green giant. Eventually, he’s tracked down by the U.S. military, led by General Thunderbolt Ross (William Hurt) and British mercenary Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth), who set him on the run back to the U.S. Once stateside, Banner hooks up with former flame Betty Ross (Liv Tyler) and they set off to find Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), a fellow scientist who believes he can formulate a cure for Bruce’s condition. Meanwhile, Ross decides to inject Blonsky with a little bit of the serum that turned Banner into the Hulk, a decision that backfires when the soldier morphs into an orange beast known as The Abomination. This sets the stage for a battle royale on the streets of New York City, where these two CGI-creatures tear shit up while innocent bystanders flee in fear. I wish all of this were as entertaining as it sounds, but I was completely unengaged by the film, even during the action sequences. What I liked about Lee’s version of the Hulk is that he brought a very specific vision to the character that was radically different from the comic and, while not always successful, made for a genuinely interesting film. There’s no emotional or dramatic meat to Leterrier’s film, particularly not the banal romance between Betty and Bruce, which kills any momentum the plot might have had. Really, the only reason to see the new Hulk is to see all the little details that the filmmakers have included in the movie to set the stage for this Avengers film that Marvel has planned for 2012. These include references to a “super-soldier serum” (paging Captain America), S.H.I.E.L.D (hi Nick Fury!) and, of course, a cameo by one Mr. Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man. These references will do doubt delight the legions of comic-book fans who will turn up for The Incredible Hulk, but in-jokes alone do not a good movie make.
