Toronto Real Estate Agents | Julie Kinnear

Ok M. Night Shyamalan…we get it! Humans need to start working harder to protect the environment. Al Gore thought the same thing, but then he went out and made something useful, An Inconvenient Truth. You decided to make this Greenpeace ad, masquerading as a horror movie. We know… we know, your career peaked early and you’ve been suffering from delusions of Hitchcockian grandeur. All the while your movie’s ratings have been on a slippery slope, with no thanks to the predictable “twists” that we’ve all come to expect. But now you’ve released your preachiest and lowest rated film yet, the “Eco-Thriller”, The Happening. The film starts off immediately, (showing around 90% of its trailer within the first 5 minutes) as we watch people in Central Park lose their coordination and find the most immediate way to kill themselves. Is it a terrorist attack? Nuclear Accident? Killer trees? The film sets us up for disappointment early, when Shyamalan goes out of his way to include the line “It was just an act of nature and we’ll never fully understand it. Science will come up with some reason, but in the end, it will just be a theory” SPOILER ALERT! Within the first 10 minutes we know that we will not get a satisfying answer for what is indeed “happening.” In the remaining 80 minutes we follow Elliot, a character that we’re supposed to care about – With no help from Mark Wahlberg’s unusually flat performance - as he tries to survive and make sense of this “event.” M. Night apparently decided he could coast through, based on premise alone, subjecting us to dozens of unintentionally funny (if not creative) suicides, and 'subtle' messages like a large billboard for a new housing development stating “You deserve this!” I tried to be positive and hold on to hope, after all Shyamalan is a big fan of game-changing endings. The joke was on me…I don’t even think there WAS an ending! Something was happening then it stopped happening, roll credits.

• IMDB link: The Happening
• Rating: ½