THE HAPPENING - decent concept hamstrung by mis-casting

Evidently, THE HAPPENING is a piss-poor film, but it is not as risible as many reviewers have accused it of being. Admittedly, I was in a minority of near-one in liking M Night Shyamalan's last film, THE LADY IN THE WATER, so maybe my ability to critique his work has been tarnished.But, for all that, it seems to me that what irks critics is that M Night Shyamalan does the same thing over and over: he makes these portentious thrillers in which mankind is imperiled by some spooky external force. I'm sure that the fact that he cast himself as the saviour of the world in his last movie didn't endear him to his peers either.

The thing about THE HAPPENING is that the central conceit is a good one. It's a disaster movie that's perfectly in tune with the INCONVENIENT TRUTH generation, and seems strangely plausible. I even like the fact that Shyamalan avoids the classic disaster movie set pieces - you know, the scenes that were done so well in KNOWING. When disaster comes, people flee the city, but instead of cars jamming up the exits from New York, people are walking through the countryside outside of Philadelphia. Their reactions all seem plausible and all the more frightening for that.

The problem with THE HAPPENING, other than its pointless title, is that it's mis-cast in its lead roles. To put it bluntly, Mark Wahlberg and John Leguziamo just don't look convincing as school teachers. And once you twig to that, it's all over.

THE HAPPENING opened in summer 2008 and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

BREACH - intelligent character-driven drama

Rubbish poster, great film.

Chris Cooper is outstanding in capturing the enigmatic and contradictory nature of FBI lifer and Soviet-run mole, Robert Hanssen. On one level, Hanssen is an eerily straight-laced man. He attends mass daily, hates women who wear trousers and homosexuals, and loves his country. But Hanssen is running a seamier double-life, where he sells porn films starring his own wife and harbours ludicrous fantasies about Catherine Zeta Jones. He has also been giving the Soviets highly sensitive classified information for the past twenty-odd years. My theory - after a life-long fascination with the Cambridge spies - is that all moles are driven by frustrated arrogance - and Hanssen, as depicted here, conforms with that view. At bottom, their decisions seem less to do with ideology than with vanity and the belief that their own superior intelligence gives them the right to break the rules. In Hanssen's case, he feels his career has been stunted by office politics, and that he is almost doing the US a favour by exposing the weakness of their security systems. And after all, isn't it fun playing a game in which you have everyone fooled?

As foils for Chris Cooper's brilliance, we have Ryan Philippe playing Eric O'Neill, the young wannabe agent who was assigned to keep tabs on Hanssen and eventually brought him in. Philippe plays a similar sort of role to those in FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS and CRASH. He is always convincing as the quiet young man of integrity who has to face up to the fact that the institutions he grew up believing in are not as peaches and cream as he thought. Laura Linney and Dennis Haysbert are little more than age-appropriate delivery devices.

What I love about this film is its patient expositon of all the facets of Hanssen's character and its unwillingness to trim everything down to a clear answer. This adult attitude is evident even in small choices. Early on, the usually grim-faced Hanssen walks past a car in a parking garage and gives a wry smile. The name plate above the car is of Louis Freeh. There is no attempt to explain to the audience who this is. It's assumed that we've all read a newspaper and get the significance.

It's also a real triumph that although we know how the story ends, BREACH is always suspenseful and tense. Writer-director Billy Ray has done a great job.

BREACH went on release in the USA, Israel, Hungary, Singapore, Iceland, South Africa, Poland, Turkey, Australia, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Kuwait, Russia, Greece, Brazil and Mexico earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Spain on October 11th and in Germany on October 18th 2007.