The Happening is the latest film from writer-director-producer M Night Shyamalan, and was released on Friday (Friday the 13th).  I watched it at Prasad's Multiplex yesterday with Varun and parents.  We had front-row seats, literally — as our seats were just in front of the screen!  I'd read reviews of the movie saying that it was a "return to form" for Shyamalan after recent disappointments.  So I was pretty excited about seeing this movie.  This is also an R-rated movie, and people were talking about how effective the first five minutes of the film were.

Central Park, New York City — people are going about their business as usual, and suddenly everyone freezes — and then chaos ensues.  People start dropping dead, and the shocking thing is that they've killed themselves!  Schoolteacher Elliot (Mark Wahlberg), wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel) and the child of Elliot's colleague must figure out what is happening and remain alive.  Similar to Shyamalan's Signs, a crisis slowly builds up — but unlike that movie, The Happening doesn't have a twist at the end.  The reason behind the events in the movie is revealed during its course.

Overall, I have to say I was very disappointed with this movie.  The Sixth Sense was an amazing movie, likewise for Unbreakable.  I liked Signs but I felt it was a step down from Shyamalan's earlier efforts.  I didn't get to see The Village in a proper theatre, and while the movie was well shot, the twist ending was a bit too far-fetched.  Haven't seen Lady in the Water till date.  Discounting that, I'd say The Happening was the worst of the lot.  The premise is interesting and while the explanation is quite absurd, I was willing to accept it.  But the movie lacked tension and to make matters worse, the dialogue made the actors look bad — and drew unintentional laughter from the audience in several places.  There were several places where you could see the mic dip into the top of the frame (probably that was meant to be cropped off).  And finally, it appeared that some bits were cut from the print they screened.  Our censors are to blame here for ruining the film even further (what is the point of giving a movie an "A" certificate if you're going to remove everything that makes it an adult-oriented movie?).  They ruined Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street too this way — they "cut" every throat-slashing scene.  It's stuff like this that'll make you download a copy of the movie in order to see the excised footage.  Anyway, The Happening was underwhelming to say the least.  To it's credit though, some of the scenes were impressive (Shyamalan did think of some innovative ways for people to off themselves!), but those didn't make up for the rest of the movie.  If you want to see a real Shyamalan movie, pull out your DVD of The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable (I only have a VCD of the movie though!) and watch that instead.  I'd rate this one a 5/10.

I really wanted to see Kamal Haasan's latest movie Dasavathaaram (which also got released on the same day), but absolutely no tickets were available this weekend (both Tamil and Telugu versions were screening and everything was sold out), so I think I'll have to book tickets in the middle of the week for next weekend instead.