It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

M. Night Shyamalan is a talented fellow. He might just be the greatest living film director. Not only has he assembled an impressive canon of films, but now he has gone one better than Hitchcock and invented an altogether new type of scary film - the film that actually tries to kill you.

Allow me to explain.

A few years ago, ol' Shyamalanadingdong was licking his wounds after the abysmal Lady In The Water:
"I need to come back with a hit movie, but all my fans are expecting a twist ending," he thought to himself. "How can I surprise them?"

At this precise moment, M. switched on the TV, and by a twist of fate, the Friends episode The One With The Race Car Bed was on. He watched as the show's hopeless Joey Tribbiani taught a group of aspiring soap-actors the secret of "sniff the fart acting". Shyamalan rolled off the couch in tears of laughter. He laughed so much, his sides hurt. It was at this exact point he had an epiphany!

He picked up the phone and called the President of 20th Century Fox. He took his latest film concept - the idea of a suicide-epidemic spreading over the globe - and pitched a new idea to the suit on the other end of the line:

"What if - open your mind real wide, and just imagine what if - instead of having a surprise twist ending in my next picture, I actually try and kill the audience by making them laugh...themselves...to...death?!?!? They'd never expect it!"

The exec - currently distracted by two 18-year old hookers blowing him - thought it was the greatest idea he had ever heard in his life, greenlit the idea, and hung up the phone.

Shyamalan got working almost immediately. He took his initial germ of an idea - a suicide epidemic - and quickly fleshed out a script. After reading his first draft, he sent it to the finest comic minds in Hollywood and asked them to re-write the screenplay as though it was an extended Saturday Night Live sketch.

The director began casting for his new film. He first cast John Leguizamo, as he remembered how funny he was in the Super Mario Bros. movie. He then cast Zooey Deschanel as the female lead (because he thought her name sounded amusing). But he still didn't have a leading man. Shyamalan thought long and hard but couldn't decide on anybody particular. Then he remembered the Friends episode and cast Marky Mark Wahlberg - a veteran of "sniff the fart" acting...















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The finished film is one of the worst films I have ever seen. The Happening is not just bad - it is offensive. Wahlberg appears to have lost any talent he displayed in Boogie Nights and I Heart Huckabees and on the strength of the classroom scene alone (where he appears to ask "Don't you care about the bees?" repeatedly for 10 minutes), he can now slip into a career in full-on comedy without anybody noticing any change in direction.

The script is terrible and the acting is wooden. Overall, the direction appears completely misguided. In 91 minutes, Shyamalan seems to have knocked down any respect he may have garnered from The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs. How can such a talented man go from Hitchcock to Ed Wood so effortlessly?

The film is not only dissapointing - it is insulting. In one scene, Marky Mark and his companions seek refuge in a roadside diner. A stranger at a near-side table shows a video he has been sent on his mobile phone of a man committing suicide in a zoo. The image we see - expertly framed and in perfect clarity - is shown on an iPhone in one of the most blatant pieces of product placement to ever grace the silver screen.

Not since Moulin Rouge have I ever been so insulted by a film. Not since Die Another Day have I ever been so dissapointed in a filmmaker. And not since Perfume: The Story of a Murderer have I ever laughed so much at a film that is not supposed to be funny.

Still, I'm looking forward to Shyamalan's next project - an autobiogaphical documentary which will explore the reasons why he's slowly morphing into a mid-1980s Michael Jackson.