M. Night Shyamalan is certainly a product of the multiplex age. All of his films aim for a wide audience, although unlike many an anonymous blockbuster direction, his films are both instantly recognizable and aim to stretch audiences whilst entertaining them. His success in this department is spotty, often his films are little more than the sum of their extraordinarily crafted parts. He has somewhat of a handicap in the screenwriting department (notice his earlier films The 6th Sense, Unbreakable and Signs were more widely successful due to a launguid, brooding pace which minimized the dialogue usually aiming for silences to do the heavy lifting). But while he may come back to similar themes (redemption, solving human problems in extraordinary circumstances) Shyamalan nevertheless retains a desire to experiment with individual elements of the form. The unusual exposition techniques employed in Lady in the Water may have baffled audiences into writing off that film (well that and this own hagiographic hubris); with The Happening he has taken these experiments further.

The principle characters are mainly in the dark as to what is actually going on, yet there are many cutaways to television news bits and incidental cellular phone conversations from background players. Many of these experiments fail, in a modern film it seems a bit silly for someone in a panic to put their phone on speaker (for the audience’s information). I would love to see M. Night and David Mamet argue over how to pass information along to an audience because they take decidedly opposite approaches. In the exposition department, The Happening is definitely not Spartan. Furthermore, a wholly unnecessary (and perhaps unintentionally) hilarious iPhone scene involving a lion tamer which looks like it is from either Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, or Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers undercuts horrific tension because it is just too darn goofy. A certain type of film-lover may like that scene, but really, why chop your film off at the knees for something so acutely unnecessary?

These over the top gore moments are combined with (intentionally?) oddball performances from the three leads. In perhaps the worst performance of his career Mark Wahlberg lays it on really thick as the much-suffering wounded puppy with maximum pout towards a wet-blanket Zooey Deschanel. But the cheese-cake award goes to a way-over-the-top Betty Buckley serving as a stand-in for Tim Robbins character in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds or Marcia Gay Harden in The Mist. In fact it seems like Shyamalan wants to play in the same sandbox as Spielberg or Darabont as modern takes on 1950’s B-Sci-fi filcks go. Yet The Happening has neither the delicious subtext of former or the full-on embrace of the style in the latter. Full disclosure, Wahlberg’s nutty performance by the end of the film had won me over.

Despite a laundry lists of flaws, The Happening succeeds as an edge-of-your-seat apocalypse flick even if you can’t take too much of it seriously. Even with this type of scenario tackled so often in the past 5 years or so, the unpredictable nuttiness from scene-to-scene makes (will it be serious, will it be funny, will the characters attempt to outrun the wind?) it a more engrossing than most. I’m tempted to label it a winner in a lackluster year for blockbusters.