Filmcritic.com Hated The Happening

Bill Gibron from Filmcritic.com airs out M. Night Shyamalan in this excerpt from his review of The Happening:

It's official: M. Night Shyamalan is no longer the next Spielberg. At this rate he won't even be the next Ray Dennis Steckler. After the stellar Sixth Sense and the equally excellent Unbreakable, he's managed a downward spiral that few on his Tinseltown trek could survive. Sure, Signs made money, and The Village has its defenders, but after the calamitous Lady in the Water, it was commercial do or die for the 38-year-old. So he responded to said challenge by delivering a cockamamie concept involving the end of the world (or at least the Eastern seaboard of the United States part of it) and how a diminishing group of ethnically mixed individuals deal with all the death and destruction.

FYI, Ray Denis Steckler is a B-movie (and sometime porn) producer, which is something Shyamalan can only aspire to at this point.

Kurt Loder Hated The Happening

MTV's Kurt Loder wrote a review of this garbage movie which pretty much nails it. Here is a choice excerpt:

I don't want to say "The Happening" is a bad movie. Well, yes I do; in fact, consider it said. But it's bad in more than just an everyday, sure-does-suck kind of way. Director M. Night Shyamalan's last picture, "Lady in the Water," based on a bedtime story that put everybody to sleep, was a bad movie plain and simple. "The Happening," on the other hand — with its what-the-hell plot, lobotomized dialogue and consequent B-movie performances — is worse, in a way, because littered among its many baffling passages are brief, vivid demonstrations of what a skillful filmmaker Shyamalan can be. And has been. I'd say "will be again," too, but that no longer seems such a sure thing.

Loder and I part ways on that last point, though. I think Shyamalan is completely washed up and is incapable of making good movies.  The Happening continues the lineage of The Village and Lady in the Water, which were such amazing pieces of trash, there is no going back for this guy.

The Happening Sucks

M. Night Shyamalan comes through with another piece of garbage. The Happening is only slightly less worse than Intersection and The Village (another Shyamalan film).  

Here's the premise:  People in the Northeast start killing themselves en masse.  It is revealed that plants are causing the suicides by releasing toxins because man has become a threat to the planet.  I can see how a good story could be spun from this idea, but this movie blows it.  The acting is terrible and the rationale for the deaths is like a footnote at the end of the film.  It's like 90 minutes of deaths and suspense and then 5 seconds of environmental moralizing.  Yawn.

Shyamalan is so stuck on trying to deliver a clever "twist" ending that he forgot how to make good movies.  This movie has no real twist, little plot (other than "keep moving away from the wind") and F-grade performances.  The highlight is a zookeeper feeding himself to lions (which is shown on an iPhone).  If that sounds appealing, you are a clown and deserve this film.  You will have a better time lighting $11 on fire and watching it burn than you will watching "The Happening."

I booed at the end of this film.