I'm willing to give M. Night Shyamalan a free pass for After Earth. It wasn't truly his movie and nobody could have made it any good. The blame will all be his if the found footage horror The Visit, which opens this week, turns out to be a dud (review later tonight) like so many of his recent efforts. I'm one of those people who is probably more of a Shyamalan apologist than most. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village are all pretty good in my opinion, but after that....well, he totally goes off the cliff. But the most egregious misfire of all was The Happening, some kind of message movie about climate change or something that is unintentionally funny when it's meant to be scary.
Screen Junkies have released one of their patented Honest Trailers for The Happening, and they nail everything that was wrong with it. Mark Wahlberg hilariously stars as the most unbelievable science professor ever, who somehow figures out that something is "happening" to cause mass amounts of people to commit suicide. What is it? Well, the reveal is spoiled randomly in the first few minutes, but basically Mother Nature is fighting back against humans because we litter or something. It's a pretty fucking stupid movie, but I'll be damned if I don't want to revisit it now.
