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Reviews Counted:169
Fresh:31
Rotten:138
Average Rating:4.1/10
Consensus: The Happening begins with promise, but unfortunately descends into an incoherent and unconvincing trifle.
Runtime: 1 hr 31 mins
Genre: Action/Adventure
US Box Office: $64,384,941
Synopsis: M. Night Shyamalan directs this thriller about a science teacher (Mark Wahlberg) who tries to escape with his wife and friend's daughter after an apocalyptic event. THE HAPPENING costars Zooey... [More]
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Betty Buckley
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Trying to understand the thought process of writer and director M. Night Shyamalan is akin to analyzing Jell-O. What keeps it wiggling and what binds it together? This particular circumstance also had an Alfred Hitchcock vibe.
just damned creepy
Feeble gust of an environmental horror story.
Woeful clunker of a paranoid thriller.
Top CriticA patchy, uninspired eco-thriller whose R rating (a first for Shyamalan) looks more like a B.O. hindrance than an artistic boon.
Top CriticShyamalan tries to give the events a scientific underpinning. But his logic is spotty, so what are meant to be eerie moments are not convincing.
Top CriticBoth silly and preachy.
Shyamalan seems to have lost his sense of the fine line between the disturbingly grotesque and the outright ridiculous. The film even seems to be a parody of the scientific method.
If God made the aliens go away in Signs, can true love hold back the toxic winds? More to the point, can anyone find out without laughing?
Shyamalan movies demand that you surrender to his way of telling stories. If you're up for that, you should go.
The whole solemn concoction is preposterous and not always in a fun way -- even at 99 minutes' running time, the movie provides plenty of opportunities for watch-consultation in the dark.
The screenplay is a mess, filled with unfunny moments of intended humor and funny moments of unintended humor.
In a Hollywood summer otherwise dominated by comic-book superheroes, blazing action spectacles, snickering teen sex comedies and computer-generated fantasy, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening is something different -- and a pleasant surprise.
It's an entertaining movie, which is half the game, but it's not scary, which it should be. Neither is it something to be taken seriously, though it's intended to be.
Shyamalan's such an eager recycler, grinding out the same ideas and images again and again. The man who showed such promise less than a decade ago has been leaving a diminishing creative footprint ever since.
The story essentially stops moving midway through. All that's going to occur, in terms of building any true dramatic tension, already has happened by this point.
We don't care. It doesn't matter if they live or die, if there's a happy ending, or some kind of twist. The Happening is a movie to walk out of, sleep through, or -- best of all -- not to bother with.
The plot is absurdly preachy and illogical, and the dialogue uneven, with stinging lines followed by stinkers.
Executed in bland and remote fashion, with little in the way of compelling suspense, mystery or directorial craft. Think of the worst Spielberg thriller or one of Hitchcock's dull late career works.
If Shyamalan's ever going to do something different then he should have made something manic, dark and twisted. But that's not Happening.
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