Dir.
M. Night Shyamalan, US/ India, 2008, 90 mins
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo
Review by Carol Allen
This is in the genre
of "mankind threatened
with extinction" stories and unlike Shyamalan's big
hit ""The Sixth Sense" and much of his other
work, rather than being a puzzle story with a surprise twist
is more of a straightforward tale involving the main characters
running from approaching doom.
The "happening" begins in
Central Park, when something causes the New Yorkers strolling
in the sunshine to freeze and then commit suicide. No-one
knows what is causing it. Is it a terrorist attack with
mind altering chemical weapons, a mystery virus, a government
project gone wrong or something else unexplainable? Wahlberg
plays Philadelphia science teacher Elliot Moore. As the
virus or whatever it is and the resultant panic starts
to spread out of New York and in his direction, he and
his wife Alma (Deschanel) head out to the countryside with
Elliot's colleague Julian (Leguizamo) and Julian's small
daughter.
It's an intriguing idea and an entertaining
enough story, which falls style wise somewhere between
the B movie characteristics of "Swarm" and the intelligent remake of "Invasion
of the Body Snatchers" (1978 version). It is though
primarily a chase movie, as Elliot and his companions attempt
to escape from the advancing threat. It also has a fashionable "green" angle,
when one of the characters they meet on their journey, a
kindly horticulturist who gives them a lift, suggests the
virus could be Nature fighting back in response to our abuse
of the planet. But as he's a bit of a nutter, who, like Prince
Charles, talks to his plants and believes they talk to each
other, maybe he's not to be taken too seriously. There's
also the fact, thrown in early in the film in Elliot's science
class, that around a quarter of the honeybees in the United
States disappeared without trace last year. And there's an
eccentric contribution from Broadway diva Betty Buckley,
as a hermit woman, who may or may not have something to do
with it all.
Wahlberg, who's a very engaging actor, holds it together
quite nicely but he's lumbered at times with some incredibly
banal and unintentionally funny dialogue - something which
is not uncommon in this genre. The personal story of Elliot
and Alma's marital problems is also a bit silly and trivial,
while Deschanel is irritatingly histrionic and pop eyed as
his drippy, dumb brunette wife. It largely lacks the pace
and tension that this type of story requires and sags rather
sadly into soppiness towards the end, when the couple and
the child are trapped in an isolated farmhouse and start
discussing life and love in the face of possible imminent
death. |
