Career regrets: The movie Mark Wahlberg labelled “really bad”
Every once in a while, compelling evidence emerges to suggest Mark Wahlberg could be a fantastic character actor if he sets his mind to it, only for the star to quickly revert to type and fall back on his tried-and-trusted schtick of headlining genre flicks that could generously be described as mediocre at best.
However, the duality of the former Marky Mark was on show in the aftermath of his scene-stealing turn in Scorsese’s labyrinthine crime saga. In the years immediately prior to The Departed, Wahlberg had collaborated with renowned filmmakers David O. Russell and John Singleton, but his first credit after his first time being recognised by the Oscars came in the entirely forgettable actioner Shooter.
Not to dust off a well-worn cliché, but inside Wahlberg, there appear to be two wolves. One of them finds him steering his passion project The Fighter to acclaim and ‘Best Picture’ candidacy, while the other reverts him back into action hero mode in dreck like Max Payne, and that formula has been rinsed and repeated for decades.
On paper, Wahlberg flirting with auteurs always carries potential, except when the auteurs in question are in the midst of a gradual downward spiral that eventually necessitates a complete career revival.
Enter M. Night Shyamalan and The Happening, an environmentally-conscious hybrid of horror and thriller that ticked none of the boxes associated with either genre, instead delivering an unintentionally hilarious escapade predicated on evil plants.
Prestige drama this most certainly was not, with Shyamalan continuing to become a parody of the wunderkind who burst onto the scene through the likes of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs, all while Wahlberg stood around as beleaguered high school science teacher Elliott Moore and gazed into the middle distance at the nonsense constantly unfolding all around him.
The Happening has since been reappraised as something worth watching for the complete opposite reasons behind its creation, gaining kitschy appeal as a tongue-in-cheek B-movie tier comedy that’s so ludicrous on every imaginable level that viewing it through the lens of an accidental exercise in hilarity is the sole way to derive any enjoyment from such a silly, silly film.
Wahlberg engaging in gentle conversation with malevolent fauna was never going to become part of his career highlight reel, but at least he was cognisant enough to admit The Happening was terrible, not that anybody needed that spelt out when the evidence was right there on-screen for all to see.
Echoing the sentiments of everyone who had the misfortune of paying good money for a ticket to catch it in their local cinema, Wahlberg aptly summed up Shyamalan’s folly in three simple words: “Fucking trees, man”. Ironically, part of what drew him to a movie he accurately branded “really bad” was the lure of playing an academic, something that doesn’t come along too often for an actor of his ilk.
He was heavily criticised for that, too, with Wahlberg hardly making the most convincing or believable case that his character had dedicated their life to studying science and then passing those learned pearls of wisdom onto the next generation.
Bizarrely, the years have been kind to The Happening as it evolved from a slab of schlocky nonsense into an endearingly misjudged B-movie, but that wasn’t the intention heading in.
Nobody sets out to make a bad film or a cult classic because those are two things that shouldn’t be the driving force behind any feature, but the combination of Shyamalan coming increasingly close to disappearing up his own rear end in the late 2000s and Wahlberg being comfortably out-acted by inanimate plant life ensured it happened entirely organically for The Happening.
