The Happening

The Happening comes off a little too much like second-rate Stephen King, and its message about Mother Nature taking revenge on the populace feels a little too on-the-nose.

The Happening is something different -- and a pleasant surprise.

It is no doubt too thoughtful for the summer action season, but I appreciate the quietly realistic way Shyamalan finds to tell a story about the possible death of man.

The film's concluding mood feels a little pat given the disaster's body count. Even so, it's not far-fetched to consider Shyamalan a knight errant of the compassionate scary movie.

With The Happening, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan bounces back from the turgidness of The Village and the idiocy of Lady in the Water.

The Happening isn't like other current movies, and that's partly what I like about it. It doesn't want to be.

Although it has some effective moments and a clever premise, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller is short on thrills. Not a whole lot happens in The Happening.

The Happening tries to be too many different kinds of movies -- thriller, cautionary tale, domestic drama - and falls short on every count.

After a provocatively creepy setup, the first foray into R-rated territory by the director of The Sixth Sense only shocks us with its lack of surprise, controversy or even competence.

Even in a misfire like The Happening, Shyamalan has a fine feeling for dread. He knows how to creep you out.

The movie demonstrates a smart movie geek's obsession with the rhythms and gory details of horror storytelling, undermined by a pompous insistence on spiritual lessons of the tritest kind (don't be mean to Mother Nature!

It's executed in bland and remote fashion, with little in the way of compelling suspense, mystery or directorial craft.

Some of the baroque suicides, visited upon complete strangers, begin to smack of comedy.

Ever since his audacious debut with The Sixth Sense, we have come to expect the unexpected from M. Night Shyamalan. The big surprise in his latest feature, The Happening, is... there isn't one.

Plants go on the attack against humans who are so banal they might as well be vegetables.

After sitting through The Happening, a Fox release being marketed as M. Night Shyamalan’s “first R-rated film,” a small voice in my head keeps repeating, “I see dead executives.”

Nine years and five films later, M. Night Shyamalan may have finally proved that he'll never make a movie as good as The Sixth Sense -- the picture that brought him all the attention in the first place.

You don't have to be a stickler for clarity to be infuriated by The Happening, which has the wooden ear and ponderous metaphysical chin stroking of an inadequate Twilight Zone episode.

You'll see plenty of dead people in M. Night Shyamalan's latest effort, but you may not notice. Nothing in The Happening is particularly lively.

Basically it’s a half-hour Twilight Zone episode blown up to feature length.

The Happening wants to scare us without providing a cause -- a trick only Hitchcock has managed.

The Happening plays like an afterthought, a doodle from a smart storyteller who lost interest in his tale. The Happening simply isn't happening.

A tale of natural catastrophe proves underwhelming, as Shyamalan fails again to live up to the promise of The Sixth Sense.

Oddly for Shyamalan, whose long takes and careful compositions encourage identification with his characters, it ultimately fails to involve us with its hero's plight.

This hapless Happening starts out scary but fizzles into a premise without a payoff.

Shyamalan has never let plausibility get in the way of a good story, but he seems to have misjudged the scale of this story. It's more suited to an old Twilight Zone episode than a full-length movie.

Benefits greatly from Shyamalan's highly intriguing premise. But it suffers just as much from Shyamalan's weak dialogue, stilted direction and inability to connect with his actors.

It's an entertaining movie, which is half the game, but it's not scary, which it should be.

Shyamalan, who brilliantly showed in The Sixth Sense that he knows how to capture an audience with ominous quiet, seems to be coasting here.

An eco-horror movie answering the question: What if Al Gore hired Hostel's Eli Roth to direct An Inconvenient Truth?

Shyamalan seems to have lost his sense of the fine line between the disturbingly grotesque and the outright ridiculous.

M. Night Shyamalan used to have a vast army of fans. Now he has a dwindling network of apologists.

Shyamalan manages to inadvertently reveal the simple truth that "high concept" moviemaking isn't particularly effective without a concept, no matter how well you can build suspense.

Shyamalan always serves as his own writer, director and producer, a choice that indicates either unfailing competence or extreme egotism.

The pacing is fine, and the on-the-road confusion and paranoia work some of the time. But the plot is absurdly preachy and illogical, and the dialogue uneven, with stinging lines followed by stinkers.

A paper-thin suspense story that might have made a good half-hour segment of The Twilight Zone in the '60s but fails miserably as a full-length feature in the here and now.

It's neither dull nor stimulating, neither off-putting nor engaging. It's gratuitously violent in a few spots; writer-director M. Night Shyamalan wanted an R rating, though the film would have worked just as well without one.

In The Happening, the roles of the uninvolved observers will be played by the audience.

A movie that features Wahlberg suggesting everyone try to outrun the wind can barely be watched once.

With such an asinine concept and cardboard acting to back it up, a better title for The Happening might be Attack of the Killer Ferns.

As most of his films confirm, Shyamalan is far better at setup than payoff, and the Sixth Sense director's latest once and for all cements that reputation.

An ecological thriller from filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan in which quite a bit happens, but not much of it terribly meaningful or thrilling.

The welcome twist is that there is no twist -- the story, however unsatisfying, is allowed to play itself out without gimmicks or stunts.

There are a few bona-fide scares and unsettling images. But for a doomsday thriller, the terror is diluted. The dialogue is wooden, the suspense never really mounts, and the story feels inert.

The Happening is as suspenseful as walking through your backyard and as satisfying as reading just the first page of a script.

The Happening has the distinction of being far scarier for the ideas behind it than for anything in it.

If you didn't know better, you'd swear The Happening was supposed to be taken as a joke. An elaborate and sometimes head-scratching one, but a joke nonetheless.

The longer it goes on, the sillier it gets.

Film critics have been asked to say as little as possible about M. Night Shyamalan’s new scare film about the perils of messing with Mother Nature. Fair enough. But I will say this: It’s not happening.

A monster movie desperately seeking a monster, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening doesn't make sense, much less The Sixth Sense.

Wahlberg's character, a Philadelphia high school teacher dealing with a restless spouse and the apocalypse, wavers between levelheaded determination and outright lunacy.

The twist ending that was a fixture of earlier Shyamalan films is absent here. In fact, there's hardly a finale at all, merely a lazy coda that brings the situation full circle.

Like Neil Labute’s Wicker Man remake or Lawrence Kasdan’s Dreamcatcher, its badness exerts a hypnotic fascination.

Every actor, even the no-namers, speak as if they are reading aloud from a book that they're as bored by as you are.

As a spoof or satire, I suppose The Happening could be seen as mildly amusing. As a full-fledged attempt at a creepy thriller, it can only be seen as a disaster.