Inessentials

Exactly how bad is The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller? Some say, it’s really, really bad (beware: lots of spoilers) (via jl!). And pretty much everything they say in the review is right.

But what was so amazing watching this film in a packed theater on opening night was how incredibly good some moments were. There’s an amazing scene at the beginning that - better than the horror films that dwell on this point too extensively - shows the incredible frailty of the human body in beautiful and frightening ways. A couple lines of dialogue just sparkle. Shyamalan can pull into a tight head shot like Spielberg and infuse commonplace objects with dread like Hitchcock. He really has a masterful touch.

What’s so infuriating about the film is how infrequently these moments occur. The acting is dreadful, the dialogue is written by eighth graders, the plot is laughable, there’s no twist, it’s preachier than the end of Psycho. It is really, really awful, but with really, really wonderful moments.

Compare that to The Incredible Hulk, which opened on the same day, in which nothing of interest ever happens. The movie is painful to sit through, not because it tried and failed, but because there’s not a single idea in the neighborhood. Edward Norton is at his smug worst, the action scenes are a mess, there’s no reason to care, the CGI is boring. It’s a weak knock-off of the Bourne films and the Spidey flicks, but without any of the magic that made those films work. There is one nice scene where we follow soldiers tracking a monster in NYC, and William Hurt and Tim Blake Nelson do nice supporting work, but overall the movie dulls everything it comes into contact with. Half-way through the film I was checking the clock. It made me wish there was a Happening right then and there.

So which is worse? The abysmal failure or the boring monstrosity? I think Hulk was much, much worse. I’d rather see an inventive director make a film that doesn’t work at all than see a miserable movie about a … well, about nothing. There’s no creativity within a thousand miles of Hulk, but it’s very near there in Happening. That’s also why Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, which is an utter failure as a film, is still much more engaging than nearly anything else to come out recently.

Watching a film fail can be entertaining. Watching Hulk smash stuff is not.