The film Mark Wahlberg admitted was “a bad movie”
Any M. Night Shyamalan film is the equivalent of eating a few days-old leftovers. Often it could be tasty, but there’s also a good chance that something drastically wrong can happen at any second. Although the director may have cut his teeth with phenomenal projects like Signs and The Sixth Sense, the moment where everything went wrong came with Mark Wahlberg and The Happening.
On paper, though, this didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. As we follow Mark Wahlberg’s science teacher protagonist throughout the film, some abnormal natural events cause people worldwide to kill themselves, leaving everyone else scrambling for cover. A synopsis like that might imply suspense, but what appears on the screen veers into unintentional comedy more than a few times.
Throughout the film, no one talks like an average person, either speaking in exposition to move the plot along or getting into wacky shenanigans that are more perplexing than anything else. Despite all the bewildering performances in the film, Wahlberg’s is by far the most confusing. After nabbing some of the most impressive roles in the 2000s, ‘Marky Mark’ has no idea how to sell a movie like this, adopting a weird high voice that becomes hilarious the more he tries to add emotion to it.
Granted, Wahlberg can only do so much with the script he was given, including a scene in which he attempts to convince a person that his ragtag team of people isn’t threatening by singing a couple of bars of The Doobie Brothers’ classic ‘Black Water’. Even for Shamaylan’s knack for twists in his movies, the switcheroo here is terrible, with the trees being responsible for killing people and the media chalking everything up to a random biochemical occurrence that could happen again.
Even though he might have wanted to work with Shamaylan, Wahlberg eventually admitted that it was a terrible project. When talking to Amy Adams during his work on The Fighter, Wahlberg recalled just how lucky Adams was not to get cast in The Happening. He told Collider: “We had actually had the luxury of having lunch before to talk about another movie, and it was a bad movie that I did. She dodged the bullet. And then I was still able to … I don’t want to tell you what movie … alright, The Happening. Fuck it. It is what it is. Fucking trees, man. The plants. Fuck it. You can’t blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher. At least I wasn’t playing a cop or a crook”.
While Wahlberg would eventually bounce back from his failed experiment, Shyamalan would not be so lucky. For the next few years, the eccentric director would try making even more outlandish movies with twists and an insulting remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which only angered the fanbase. The twists didn’t get much better, either, with the movie Devil explaining that the only way to tell that Satan is near is when a piece of toast falls jelly side first.
Shyamalan would eventually harness the spirit of his early films again, making a spiritual sequel to Unbreakable in Split and turning in some more respectably strange thrillers like A Knock at The Door and Old. The Happening may have been a way for Shyamalan to try out what he could be in the thriller format, but someone has crossed a line when even the actors can’t understand the tone the film is going for.
