After the double-whammy of the fun thrillers The Visit and Split, going back to watch M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening for the first time is akin to stumbling upon a photo of your friend being deeply intoxicated after that same friend has been sober for four years now. It's a glimpse into a darker era of a person's past, one that's still stuck in the back of your mind even as he cleans up his act and improves himself. Needless to say, The Happening is pretty much an awful bad terrible sinful rot of a motion picture, but it is an entertaining disaster in contrast to Shyamalan's later dismal efforts like The Last Airbender and After Earth which never went beyond being simply dismal.
