The Happening (2008)

Were he not already signed to another picture before the release of this film, it is perfectly reasonable to think that this movie would have ended director M. Night Shyamalan's career. The man who brought us The Sixth Sense and Signs is absolutely at the bottom of his game here. It starts off well enough, as people mysteriously stop in their tracks and start killing themselves en masse for no reason, while school teacher Mark Wahlberg leads a group of “survivors” on a tour of New England to escape the chaos. Things degenerate from tepid to nauseating in quick order from there. The rest is pointlessly graphic violence shoehorned into a script that is, at worst, rated PG and carried out by a cast with the enthusiasm of someone who lost a bet. And don't even get me started on the whole end sequence. This director was once the prodigal child of cinema, someone to look out for. Yet the more he does, the worse his films become. Maybe the mass suicides in this movie is him screaming out, wanting to quit the biz. More likely they're symptoms of a man who still has good ideas, but no longer has any notion of how to turn them into a functioning film.

3 out of 10.