"Are you joking?" Zooey Deschanel's unhappy young wife asks her husband Mark Wahlberg in response to a badly timed quip about their failing marriage.

**
Dir: M. Night Shyamalan
With: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo

"Are you joking?" Zooey Deschanel's unhappy young wife asks her husband Mark Wahlberg in response to a badly timed quip about their failing marriage. "Yes," comes the answer from Wahlberg, playing a complacent science teacher. But while his bittersweet declaration of enduring love is emphatic enough, it's entirely unclear whether or not M Night Shyamalan's latest paranormal thriller, set amid an apocalyptic event that's laying waste to the entire population of north-eastern America, is to be taken seriously or not. The portents aren't good and, as is increasingly the case with Shyamalan's brand of Twilight Zone-like mysteries, the film is laden with them.

In a startling opening sequence set in New York's Central Park, the city's normally hyperactive citizens stop dead in their tracks, begin walking backwards, and finally start to kill themselves. Meanwhile, in another well-staged set-piece, located downtown, a labourer is stunned to see his work pals throwing themselves like so many lemmings off of the top of the skyscraper they were mere moments ago building. The exact cause of the mass suicides is revealed around the half way mark (so no last-reel revelation as was the case in The Sixth Sense), but the build-up is slow and so the mystery is easily solvable beforehand. Worse still, once all is revealed the film becomes absolutely ridiculous.

As usual, the basic premise of Shyamalan's film is a chillingly imaginative one. But, oh dear, does the realisation of it misfire. Far too literal and po-faced treatment of ideas that remain underdeveloped, plus a lot of howlingly bad dialogue, results in the generation of a lot of unintentional laughter. And the subsequent shoe-horning in of some bizarrely ill-judged humour only makes matters worse, so that Deschanel's question to Wahlberg effectively summarises one's reaction to another disappointing dud from a not untalented filmmaker.