The Happening

Directed by M Night Shyamalan, starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Ashlyn Sanchez

Things seem normal. People are going about their business as per usual. But watch: something inexplicable and scalp-pricklingly strange is happening - the attempted resurrection of M Night Shyamalan's career.

Shyamalan is the director who after his breakout feature The Sixth Sense - the gargantuan final twist of which gave a generation of moviegoers whiplash - lost ground with a series of increasingly silly and not-scary films. His nadir arrived with Lady in the Water, a whimsical romantic fantasy in which the director unblushingly cast himself in the role of a visionary writer who can save the world.

So you have to admire the chutzpah with which Shyamalan has returned, utterly undaunted, with another of his odd, self-conscious event movies.

The action begins in New York, on a summer's day in Central Park. In among the panoply of ordinariness, people start behaving strangely. Then fatally. Something is in the air. Panic spreads: is it a terrorist poison-gas attack? Or is it, more disquietingly still, microbes released from natural greenery by some freak condition of nature? The strange behavior begins with the whole city crowd standing stock still, and then very, very slowly starting to walk backwards. It looks like an iPod advert.

At the same moment, in Philadelphia - where the plague is heading, fast - Mark Wahlberg is playing Elliott, a serious high school science teacher, wearing a sleeveless jumper. He is quizzing his intrigued class of teens about recent reports of honeybees disappearing from North America overnight - an ill omen. The class make various explanatory attempts, including a suggestion of "global warming", but Elliott superciliously drones that: "Science will come up with some reason to put in the books but in the end it'll just be a theory. We will fail to acknowledge that there are forces at work beyond our understanding." For this typically fatuous anti-rational, anti-scientific piece of smuggery, Shyamalan deserves a clip round the ear.

Elliott's wife Alma is played by Zooey Deschanel, who gives the most baffling performance of her life. But even she is not as weird as John Leguizamo, who plays another mathematics teacher at Wahlberg's school. Quite frankly, he looks madder than a junkyard dog. The Guardian

(China Daily 06/26/2008 page20)