This movie confirmed three things: John Leguizamo is a better actor than Mark Wahlberg, environmental messages in films are seriously getting tired, and M. Night Shyamalan needs to change his style of filmmaking if he wants me to be excited for his next movie. Oh yeah, and now I'm horribly afraid of plants.
The plot is simple enough: Mark Wahlberg and his wife (who are having problems in their marriage, of course) are on the run from an airborn toxin that makes people commit suicide. It seems like it would be an interesting premise for something seriously entertaining. Hell, how could people killing themselves not be fun to watch? Somehow, though, The Happening makes even mass suicide boring. It almost seems almost like Shyamalan was trying to make it boring.
More...I'm not the kind of person who really gets too excited over blood and gore and stuff in movies (unless it really fits the theme; I'm a fan of the Hostel movies), but when The Happening's advertising campaign is based around it being Shyamalan's first R-rated movie, then you'd expect lots of fun deaths, especially with the story's potential for so many interesting suicides. But alas, there are very few, and even they aren't shown in full.
That aside, the movie itself is just downright slow. The "paranoia" aspect of it never really makes it to the foreground of the film, obscured by the constant "okay, we've seen this already" feeling. This movie likes to repeat itself. A lot. There are a few points where I found myself thinking (and saying out loud) "we get the point, get back to the story". Sometimes slow pacing can work very well to increase tension in a movie like this, but here it just... makes everything seem to take forever.
The environmental message was a bit over the top (as in very very blatant to the point where it dumbed down the entire movie into being some kind of threatening GO GREEN advertisement). Still, as a whole it wasn't bad. It wasn't entertaining at all, but it wasn't really a bad movie. Hard to explain. But this is the entertainment business, and since it didn't do its job in that department, I'd have to say this was a bad one.
The plot is simple enough: Mark Wahlberg and his wife (who are having problems in their marriage, of course) are on the run from an airborn toxin that makes people commit suicide. It seems like it would be an interesting premise for something seriously entertaining. Hell, how could people killing themselves not be fun to watch? Somehow, though, The Happening makes even mass suicide boring. It almost seems almost like Shyamalan was trying to make it boring.
More...I'm not the kind of person who really gets too excited over blood and gore and stuff in movies (unless it really fits the theme; I'm a fan of the Hostel movies), but when The Happening's advertising campaign is based around it being Shyamalan's first R-rated movie, then you'd expect lots of fun deaths, especially with the story's potential for so many interesting suicides. But alas, there are very few, and even they aren't shown in full.
That aside, the movie itself is just downright slow. The "paranoia" aspect of it never really makes it to the foreground of the film, obscured by the constant "okay, we've seen this already" feeling. This movie likes to repeat itself. A lot. There are a few points where I found myself thinking (and saying out loud) "we get the point, get back to the story". Sometimes slow pacing can work very well to increase tension in a movie like this, but here it just... makes everything seem to take forever.
The environmental message was a bit over the top (as in very very blatant to the point where it dumbed down the entire movie into being some kind of threatening GO GREEN advertisement). Still, as a whole it wasn't bad. It wasn't entertaining at all, but it wasn't really a bad movie. Hard to explain. But this is the entertainment business, and since it didn't do its job in that department, I'd have to say this was a bad one.
