The Happening

Jun 15 2008 Sunday Sun

DIRECTOR: M Night Shyamalan. CAST: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Ashlyn Sanchez, Betty Buckley, Alan Ruck. RUNNING TIME: 90mins.

HAVING lapped up all the trailers for this movie with relish, you can’t come close to understanding how gutted I was to find out that all the hype was nothing but hot air.

M Night Shyamalan’s apocalyptic tale of survival is nothing short of laughable and preposterous.

The white-knuckle tension — which Shyamalan generates in a tour-de-force opening 10 minutes — evaporates the instant the characters open their mouths.

To be fair, opening scenes in Central Park and surrounding areas of New York are truly unsettling and, as long as the film clings to delicious ambiguities — are the deaths the result of a terrorist attack, radiation from a nuclear accident, a botched government experiment? — we’re willing to grant Shyamalan the benefit of the doubt.

However, as soon as he declares which forces are really at work to bring about mankind’s day of reckoning, we lose all interest.

Shyamalan has consistently toyed with and subverted expectations, and The Happening will certainly shock and surprise audiences who enjoyed his earlier films, including The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and The Village, though not in a good way.

A series of chilling and bizarre episodes in major American cities leads to mass suicide, and panic sweeps the nation as terrified residents clamour for answers.

High school teacher Elliot Moore — Mark Wahlberg — sees the crisis on the news and heads into the Pennsylvanian farmlands with his therapist wife — Zooey Deschanel — to outrun the impending danger.

The couple takes mathematics teacher Julian and his eight-year-old daughter Jess with them.

As they head into the countryside, Elliot and his fellow travellers meet more survivors, all desperate for news.

They quickly realise that nothing can stop the invisible killer which seems destined to wipe out the human race.

The Happening uses a high school principal as a crude mouthpiece to distil the facts and spark Elliot’s escape: “There appears to be an event happening. The first stage is loss of speech, the second stage is physical disorientation, the third stage is fatal.”

Catastrophe quickly engulfs the central protagonists, leading to some comical death scenes, such as a man laying down in front of a lawn mower.

Wahlberg and Deschanel have never been more wooden, and a superfluous coda fans the flames of enmity between America and France.

“Mon dieu!” indeed, to echo the film’s last words.