The Happening

Whatever you do, don't insult the audience.

It is hard to imagine a film worse than The Happening.

The seemingly endless series of scenes itself seems to get lost in nonsenses. The script is over-dramatic and incoherent. The acting, painfully executed through some of the most senseless lines of the film history, is just terrible. Both main actors, Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel give very poor performances, sadly matching the quality of the story. We can almost feel the pain as we watch in astonishment, denying what our eyes see, and force ourselves to smile before a few scattered jokes. This is a film that doesn't move forward. Nearly every scene of the film is either unnecessary, or badly built, or both. Ridiculous moments and easy scare shots degrade the genre and insult the public over and over.

Before watching this film, after seeing the promising trailer, one would want to go out of his way to compliment M. Night Shyamalan, director of The Sixth Sense and would even be inclined to forgive his momentary slip-up with the lamentable The Village. But the truth is that, in The happening, the script is as weak as the directing work. And the actors' delivery is just one of many tokens of it.

Out of respect to filmmakers who love what they do and make films for intelligent audiences, films like this should, quite simply, not be made.