M. Night, you owe me $10...

...plus the cost of popcorn and soda. The Happening... I swore to myself I would not go see another M. Night movie after seeing 'The Village'. I promised myself I would never pay more than the rental fee for a DVD of an M. Night movie after seeing 'Signs'. And yet there I was shelling over $10 for a ticket, $15 for popcorn and soda and $40 for a babysitter so I could punish myself and watch 'The Happenning'.

Now I have to give kudos to M. Night for always filming in and around my hometown of Philadelphia. And I also have to applaud M. Night for trying to make a statement about our environment. It wasn't a well thought out statement, but he tried.

So without giving away the entire film, I will instead point out that M. Night has ridden the coat tails of 'The Sixth Sense' for far too long. The place where M. Night fails is exactly the place where Spielberg succeeds. I am not saying Spielberg is the best director in the world but compared to M. Night...well you get my point.

Let's start with 'Signs'. In 'Signs' about halfway through the film, M. Night himself shows up and tells Mel Gibson that he doesn't know what the creatures are but he does know that they are afraid of water. Now how does he know this? And how convenient is this little nugget of information? And why the hell would they land on a planet that is 90% water? Compare that to 'Indiana Jones and the Raiders of th Lost Ark'. All we need to know about the ark is told to us as Indy explains it to the FBI guys at the college. It is a logical, organic discussion.

M. Night seems to write his scripts without thought to logic and then when he realizes he has forgotten to tell us something we may need to know, he adds it in wherever he sees fit. In 'Jurassic Park' Spielberg lets us know how the velociraptor hunts, so that later on we will know to be afraid. In 'The Village' M. Night expects us to be afraid of an unknown entity just because it exists.

And now we come to 'The Happening'. When we meet Mark Wahlberg, he is teaching in a classroom. He is a science teacher. He is teaching the kids about bees. The movie has nothing to do with bees. Bees never play a part. This was not 'The Bee Movie'. Shouldn't he have been teaching them about how we are destroying our environment? Shouldn't he have told the students that some plants can kill? Instead he decides to have some whacko gardener with an unhealthy obsession with hotdogs, explain it all to us, a third of the way through the movie. Do we trust hotdog man? Do we have enough information to believe him? Nah. And then when we discover that the plants are trying to kill us, M. Night takes us to a remote house and forces Betty Buckley to play an unhinged woman, living alone who plays with dolls and slaps kids hands. Why? What does the doll have to do with anything? And then the film is over. The Happening is done. How did our hero grow and change? What did he learn? What did we all learn?

I am not going to ruin the movie for those of you who refuse to believe me and insist on going to waste your money. Just remember, You have sensed it, you have seen the signs, Nothing happens in 'The Happening'