Manohla Dargis, Ever the Contrarian, Is About the Only One Who Likes ‘The Happening’

So, we now totally love Manohla Dargis. The Butcher of Beverly Hills*, the New York Times’ L.A.-based hatchet woman, is justifiably resented by studios for the angry, agitating reviews she writes of their pieces of crap. And now — as if to cement her position as the critical world’s biggest contrarian — she’s given a positive review to the one movie that pretty much everyone had already agreed was terrible, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. (She’s not the only one — Roger Ebert also liked it.) Her piece definitely feels like an “It’s not as bad as you think� review rather than an “It’s legitimately good� review, though; in fact, it’s kind of illuminating to point out all the really terrible things she says about the movie in a review that’s theoretically pegged as a positive one:

• She describes Shyamalan’s filmmaking as full of “manufactured sincerity and cornball messages.�

• “Mr. Shyamalan’s words consistently fail him, as they have in the past.�

• She describes Zooey Deschanel as “oddly miscast� and “loony-looking� and says her scenes with Wahlberg are “witless marital shtick.�

• “Mr. Shyamalan’s bag of tricks is awfully familiar — the camera races forward, the characters stand locked in place, a child’s empty swing sways in the wind, eyes widen, mouths gape.�

• “It’s a shame he doesn’t know what to do with [his premise] other than mow people down.�

The final verdict is best summed up in this shrug of praise: “There is, after all, real pleasure to be had from watching a magician pull even a mangy rabbit out of a battered top hat.� And for that, Metacritic gave this review a 70! We guess The Happening really does defeat the laws of math.

• “Something is happening, all right, but Mr. Shyamalan, who certainly appears to enjoy playing God, doesn’t seem to care much.�

The final verdict is best summed up in this shrug of praise: “There is, after all, real pleasure to be had from watching a magician pull even a mangy rabbit out of a battered top hat.� And for that, Metacritic gave this review a 70! We guess The Happening really does defeat the laws of math.

Something Lethal Lurks in the Rustling Trees [NYT]

*Note: We are pretty sure Manohla Dargis doesn’t live in Beverly Hills. We just needed an L.A. neighborhood that started with B.