I was privileged enough to visit the overpriced Odeon cinema in Southampton this thursday with good company, and instead of waiting around and not doing anything like you’d expect we went and watched a movie. I quite like movies, I have even watched one during the process of writing this blog (yeah, this one has taken a long time). The movie I saw was the Happening, from the same director/writer as The Sixth Sense and Signs, M. Night Shyamalan.

I find mr M rather hit and miss, I liked Unbreakable and Signs, but the Sixth Sense is very overrated and his last movie, The Lady in the Swimming Pool. It was very miss. Very miss. I think perhaps his ego developed a little too much after his earlier success and now he’s starting to imagine his shit a rather shiny gold colour, and not the usual crap we all expect. Arrogance and self-awareness rarely go hand in hand, you should know that M.

Still, I went into this movie hopefully, I had seen some bad reviews but M himself had quoted this movie as a ‘B movie with good production values’. I figured that, knowing he approached it in this way, it might be something you can enjoy as long as you don’t take it seriously.

The Happening really isn’t all that happening, it starts off badly with some almost forgivable early scenes, begins to get better for a while before plummeting back down into misery once again. For some reason Shyamalan likes to tart up his screenplays with weird bits of random and abstract dialogue/language, and not the endearingly abstract Juno style, but the disconcerting and annoying Younglings style. The political edge to the film only adds to in a sense of contrived idiocy, and the whole thing pans out like an elaborate attempt to reimagine ‘The Attack of the Triffids’.

So, the verdict? A piss poor 3 out of 10. Sorry, Shyamalan, but the only thing intellectually engaging about this movie is trying to figure out how to spell your name on my snub list

- teh Beard.