The end of the world comes not with a bang but a snore, writes Michael Dwyer.
VERY FEW film-makers are quite so unpredictably erratic as writer- producer-director M Night Shyamalan. He thoroughly intrigued audiences with his hit breakthrough movie, The Sixth Sense(1999). At the other extreme was his preposterous Lady in the Water(2006), a wildly misconceived, self-indulgent fantasy.
That narcissistic folly starred Shyamalan himself as an overlooked visionary, a sensitive writer whose genius remains unrecognised, although the film foretells he will have a profound effect on future generations.
Dream on. There's no chance of that prophecy being fulfilled by Shyamalan's new film, The Happening.
It begins in Manhattan's Central Park on an ominously windy morning, when people freeze in their tracks and muster just enough movement to kill themselves. Three blocks away, men tumble to their deaths at a building site. Captions inform us that these events occur shortly before 9am, inevitably prompting a link with the 9/11 attacks around the same time of day.
In Philadelphia, science teacher Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg) just happens to be telling his class that acts of nature are forces beyond
our understanding. Word comes through that New York is being evacuated and that the incidents may have been caused by a terrorist attack involving airborne toxins.
In the scramble to get out of town, Elliott is joined by his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), his best friend and fellow teacher Julian (John Leguizamo), and Julian's eight-year-old daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez). We are led to believe that the Moore marriage is under strain because Alma gets persistent phone messages from somebody named Joey. It transpires that Alma is feeling guilty because she lied to Elliott about eating tiramisu with Joey, a work colleague. No kidding.
Shyamalan says he was driving through countryside and wondering if nature would ever turn on us when "the entire structure of the story for The Happening popped into my head instantly and the characters suddenly became perfectly clear". That is quite feasible given how flimsy and utterly formulaic his film is.
Its theme of mass panic and the human instinct for self-preservation is familiar from superior movies such as Invasion of the Body Snatchersand War of the Worlds. But The Happeningis devoid of tension and its characters are so wooden that it's impossible to care a whit for their fate.
The movie's post-9/11 paranoia is as bogus and opportunistic as its vaguely ecological message. The dialogue is arch, albeit often unintentionally funny. What passes for drama is so silly and pointless that, even though The Happeningruns for just an hour and a half, it is, above all, boring. Very boring.
