No "Shama-lama-ding-dong" jokes, please

The reviews are in, and there seems to be a national consensus: Film critics and Internet geeks have decided that M. Night Shyamalan's career is over.

With the notable local exceptions of our man Dann and Roger Ebert, the film geeks just loathe "The Happening," Shyamalan's new throwback to '50s B-movies where the horror on the screen is delivered with a heavy-handed message about the horrors in real life. In the '50s, it was nuclear power and Communism; in "The Happening," it's global warming and pollution.

I think the film was clearly intended on that level, and works as a fun homage to those B-movies. It's not anywhere near Shyamalan's best work, but it's certainly better than "Lady in the Water," and perhaps more satisfying than "The Village," which fell apart in the final minutes not because of the twist, but because of how the twist was presented.

But get a load of some of things people are saying about this film:

• "I try to see what's on the screen, not what's gone before, and the movie I saw was truly, mysteriously awful. Unless, of course, it was meant to be a parody of such nature-lashing-out thrillers as "The Birds." But parodies are supposed to be funny, and the only laughs I heard were bad ones." -- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

• "You feel like you're not watching the end of the world but the end of a career." -- Ty Burr, Boston Globe

• "It's a sorry enough spectacle to make admirers of 'The Sixth Sense' wonder if they didn't overrate that movie, and the director's whole oeuvre. Is Shyamalan a sham?" -- Richard Corliss, Time

• "This is the kind of movie that kills careers; it certain [sic] murdered my spirit for most of a day." -- Steve Prokopy, aka Capone, aintitcool.com

• "The scene in which (Zooey Deschanel) finds herself confronting a relentlessly ringing phone may be the single worst thing that anyone has ever done on screen." -- Peter Sobczynski, efilmcritic.com

• "What it turns out to be is a cinematic disaster of 'MST3K' proportions we haven’t seen from the likes of a major studio since, maybe ever." -- Erik Childress, efilmcritic.com

As someone who reads many of these writers on a regular basis, I can tell you that some of them just love to tell you how much they hate M. Night Shyamalan, and would most likely bash this movie no matter what. That last guy regularly appears on Nick Digilio's weekend radio show on WGN -- and has written a review or two for the Daily Herald -- and I'm sure he and Nick will have a blast Sunday calling their listeners idiots for seeing "The Happening" over the weekend; I would normally listen, but I don't really feel like taking the beating this time around.

The Friday numbers show "The Happening" is on its way to a respectable $35 million opening weekend. Knowing the film's reputation going in, I expected to see people walking out en masse amid waves of unintentional laughter. But the laughs, I think, are intended in this movie, and the audience I saw it with at the Muvico 18 in Rosemont stayed for the whole flick.

Now, I know why people in the critical community don't like Shyamalan -- he is as arrogant as they come, going so far as to cast himself as a Messiah figure in "Lady in the Water" -- but I don't react to the people who make the movies, I react to the movie. (What a concept, eh?) And my reaction to "The Happening" is that M. Night Shyamalan is a born filmmaker who maybe should stop writing his own script, and that as long as he keeps making movies -- and keeps working with marvelous composer James Newton Howard -- I'll keep going to see them.

If that makes me an idiot, then so be it.