|
New This Week
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search
Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Happening, The
20th Century Fox
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for violent and disturbing images
Starring
Mark Wahlberg,
Zooey Deschanel,
John Leguizamo,
Betty Buckley,
Spencer Breslin,
and
Ashlyn Sanchez
It begins with no clear warning. It seems to come out of nowhere. In a matter of minutes, episodes of strange, chilling deaths that defy reason and boggle the mind in their shocking destructiveness, erupt in major American cities. What is causing this sudden, total breakdown of human behavior?For Philadelphia high school science teacher Elliot Moore what matters most is finding a way to escape the mysterious and deadly phenomenon. (Twentieth Century Fox)
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
Sci-fi
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
M. Night Shyamalan
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
M. Night Shyamalan
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: October 7, 2008
Theatrical: June 13, 2008
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
91 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA | India |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
83
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
An unapologetic B-movie.
75
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
A movie that I find oddly touching. 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.
75
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
Even when his scripts aren't working, Shyamalan knows how to frame shots and build suspense. The Happening, even more than his previous films, has a visual elegance and subtlety that helps to overcome the less successful aspects of the plot.
60
Film Threat
Stina Chyn
Whether you’re a casual or an ardent follower of M. Night Shyamalan's films, The Happening could alienate or dominate your thinking cap. Remember--it's perfectly acceptable to laugh one second and shriek the next.
60
The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
A divertingly goofy thriller with an animistic bent, moments of shivery and twitchy suspense and a solid lead performance from Mark Wahlberg.
50
Los Angeles Times
Carina Chocano
It doesn't help that Wahlberg, whose work usually ranges from solid to inspired, is bewildering off-key here, though it may have something to do with playing off Deschanel, who reduces the whole marriage story line to a parody.
50
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
The movie seems more like a '50s science fiction film of extreme paranoia or an episode of "The Twilight Zone" that even at a swiftly paced 90 minutes feels padded.
50
Variety
Justin Chang
In short, this is a Shyamalan movie minus the bravado, the swagger; there are no audacious attempts to pull out the rug from under the audience, no ham-fisted lessons about the importance of religious belief or the power of storytelling.
50
Village Voice
Robert Wilonsky
What a bunch of nonsense--effective nonsense, chilling nonsense, occasionally wrenching nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless.
50
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Some sure symptoms: 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.
50
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
As for The Happening, his throwback horror flick that plays like "The Birds" meets "The Blob," it's beyond good and evil. It's dumbfounding.
50
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
It's an entertaining movie, which is half the game, but it's not scary, which it should be. Neither is it something to be taken seriously, though it's intended to be.
50
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
Think of the worst Spielberg thriller or one of Hitchcock's dull late career works, then make it ugly and fill it with bad performances; voila: The Happening.
50
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
Even in a misfire like The Happening, Shyamalan has a fine feeling for dread. He knows how to creep you out. But he has a tin ear for acting.
50
NPR
Bob Mondello
If what audiences are looking for is a thrill ride, or even a pervasive eeriness, The Happening's just not happening.
42
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Shyamalan has said he wanted to create the best B-movie ever made, but it fails to be the best C movie of the month. (Stuck or Zohan are better C movies.)
40
Empire
Will Lawrence
A disappointingly slight offering from a filmmaker that we know is capable of so much more. Shyamalan says that The Happening was his easiest film to shoot. Sadly, it shows.
40
New York Daily News
Elizabeth Weitzman
The film never builds past its initial idea, the references to 9/11 feel cheap, the good actors are wasted, and the bad ones are distracting.
40
Slate
Dana Stevens
The old-school horror tricks (the fake scare followed by a real one, the safe haven that isn't) feel more like cribbing than homage, but they get the job done.
40
Salon.com
Mary Elizabeth Williams
The man who showed such promise less than a decade ago has been leaving a diminishing creative footprint ever since.
38
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
M. Night Shyamalan's sixth film mines a rich lode of end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it clichés, but while the set up is spooky, the development is heavy handed and marred by Shyamalan's inability to write natural-sounding dialogue or convincing characters.
38
Charlotte Observer
Lawrence Toppman
It's neither dull nor stimulating, neither off-putting nor engaging.
38
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
After the insufferably dense mermaid mythology of "Lady in the Water," Shyamalan clearly wanted to keep things simple. He whizzed straight past "simple" to simplistic.
38
USA Today
Claudia Puig
Shyamalan isn't drawing the caliber of performances from his actors as he used to. Who can forget Haley Joel Osment's haunting portrayal in The Sixth Sense or that of Toni Collette, who played his mother, or Bruce Willis in arguably his best role?
38
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
The Happening is a movie to walk out of, sleep through, or - best of all - not to bother with.
38
New York Post
Kyle Smith
A movie that features Wahlberg suggesting everyone try to outrun the wind can barely be watched once.
33
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Nathan Rabin
Shyamalan still has an abundance of personality and ambition, and there are scattered moments of craft throughout, but the gulf between his lofty aspirations and feeble accomplishments has seldom been wider or more chuckle-inducing.
30
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
He still sees dead people, only now they're the best thing in the movie.
30
Chicago Reader
Andrea Gronvall
Wahlberg turns in one of his worst performances ever, but then he's saddled with preposterous scenes.
30
New York Magazine
David Edelstein
A high-toned revenge-of-nature horror picture, it's a little depressed, with only gross-out shocks (gushing jugulars, bodies run over by lawnmowers) to relieve the torpor.
30
Austin Chronicle
Marc Savlov
The Happening is both too incoherenly weird and too narratively ambitious for its own good.
25
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
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.
25
Premiere
Ryan Stewart
A disaster, representing a number of negative firsts for Shyamalan.
25
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
You feel like you're not watching the end of the world but the end of a career.
25
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
Being risibly bad, The Happening is at least worth a laugh. Exactly one laugh, by my reckoning, and completely unintended but no less full-throated for that.
20
Time
Richard Corliss
And now we have this ill wind, this feeble gust of an environmental horror story. The writer-director's disintegration from robust artistic health to narrative incoherence, from hitmaker to box-office loser, has an almost tragic trajectory. It's a saga worthy of being told by the young M. Night Shyamalan.
20
The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
To be honest, I would be perfectly happy to walk with a zombie after ninety minutes of this; it would feel like light relief.
10
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
The Happening makes you wonder whether Mr. Shyamalan's own switch may have been flipped. How else to explain his film's befuddling infelicities, insistent banalities, shambling pace and pervasive ineptitude?
 The average user rating for this movie is 5.6 (out of 10) based on 425 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Read more user comments...
Discuss this movie in our forums |
|
