Sometime after the phenomenal success of The Sixth Sense, it became popular to hate M. Night Shyamalan. Some critics, bemoaning what they see as a one-trick-pony, have turned it into something approaching sport. I’ve never jumped on that bandwagon. I love Shyamalan’s eerie, expansive imagination. I’m the one critic who thought The Village was a misunderstood masterpiece. In fact, it wasn’t until Lady in the Water that I felt Shyamalan made his first cinematic misstep. So I went into The Happening predisposed to rub shoulders with greatness. What I walked out of was one of the worst films I have ever seen.

It starts in New York City’s Central Park. People stop whatever they are doing and begin killing themselves. Deeper into the city, construction workers begin throwing themselves off high-rise buildings and cops draw their weapons and fire bullets into their brains. Soon, thousands of people are dropping dead all across the Eastern seaboard. What is causing it, no one knows. Probably some sort of airborne toxin. Obviously terrorists are involved. News anchors act as surrogate narrators, cuing us in to what’s going on.

Philly science schoolteacher Elliot Moore (Mark Walhberg) is as baffled as everyone else. But as he and his emotionally distant wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) flee to the sprawling countryside, desperate to survive, Elliot begins noticing an improbable pattern emerging. He seizes upon an explanation too preposterous to believe. Channeling Mr. Spock who was no doubt channeling the Franciscan friar William of Ockham, Elliot determines that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. What that truth is, I won’t spoil for you. Let’s just say that Mother Nature is none too happy.

Shyamalan has always been dismissed as a maker of Twilight Zone movies. And what’s so wrong with that? His mind (and heart) is in the right place. He imbues grand human themes with eerie plots that generally end with some sort of astonishing and unforeseen twist. But in The Happening, Shyamalan has made a movie so laughably awful that it would feel right at home as a SciFi Channel original presentation.

The Happening is a film of such shockingly appalling writing, dreadful acting and ham-fisted, ungainly execution that it plays better as a comedy than the thriller it was meant to be. Despite several genuinely creepy moments, there is never the sort of tension or paranoia one would expect from a film dealing with such an apocalyptic event. The film elicits peals of laughter, though rarely where we were meant to find humor. We see only parody where Shyamalan implausibly intends sincerity.

Shyamalan is a fantastic big picture guy, but like George Lucas, is so enormously egotistical as to believe that he doesn’t need help translating that vision into the nuance of a script. No one in this film speaks or acts remotely believably. As a result, even good actors act badly. Walhberg — and especially his co-star Deschanel — perfectly acceptable elsewhere, are dreadful here. Shyamalan’s direction of the camera isn’t the problem, his direction of his actors is. His graceless words turn to preposterous mush in their mouths.

The Happening is Hitchcock’s The Birds minus the birds. That Shyamalan has oft compared himself to the legendary English director is no secret. But so long as he backs up claims of greatness with worthless litter like this, his words will ring mockingly hollow. It is time for Shyamalan to stop and take a good, long, hard look at himself. If he doesn’t make an about face soon, the only twist at the end of his career will be the whiplash speed with which his rising star was cast aside.

Shyamalan, for your sake and ours, it is time for an intervention.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.