M Night has lost his sixth sense, says Donald Clarke.
So it looks as if M Night Shyamalan may have totally Lost It. After attracting attention with his second film, 1999's agreeably sinister The Sixth Sense, the immodest Asian-American went on to offer further evidence of his talent with the fascinating Unbreakable.
Since then, those of us who bought shares in MNS Industries have watched nervously as our investment gradually shrank into a handful of Confederate pennies. Lady in the Waterhad its virtues, but was so taken up with mumbo- jumbo that it would strain the patience of a Galapagos turtle. Last week we got The Happening, in which wicked hedges and malevolent shrubberies attempted to eat Mark Wahlberg. Surely there is no way back from here.
If we are being pedantic, it might be more accurate to class Night with such fleetingly radiant shooting stars as Michael Cimino, Hugh Hudson and (noting the catastrophic Speed Racer) the Wachowski Brothers than with great directors who went rotten after delivering significant bodies of work. Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Wim Wenders, Mel Brooks: each member of that varied band has directed enough classics to earn the right to continue throwing effluent at the screen until he tumbles into the grave.
All the directors above do, however, suffer from that terrible condition known as Martin Amis Syndrome. Put simply, the ailment causes once-great artists to deliver work so chillingly dreadful that fans begin to wonder whether an idiot changeling has replaced their former idol.
You know the feeling. You've bought endless rotten David Bowie albums and ploughed through the drum'n'bass noodlings and post- rock wallpaper in a vain search for the genius behind Lowand Station to Station. You've swallowed hard every time John Cleese delivered another bewilderingly broad cameo in another risible Hollywood fiasco. You've squinted wearily at the increasingly baroque gibberish that constitutes Salman Rushdie's recent writings. Let's not start on Vic Reeves.
Sadly, the condition of Losing It is often harder to reverse than the most serious of physical ailments. No scientist has yet managed to devise a cure for the disorder that caused Coppola to direct Jack or Bowie to record Never Let Me Down.
Perhaps, rather than drawing from medicine, we should look to ballistics for a suitable analogy: to Lose It is to become a small animal flung off a big cliff. The rate of descent can only be arrested by annihilation.
The only sure way to avoid this unhappy fate is to begin your career at the bottom of the cliff. Nobody has ever accused Tom Shadyac of entering a period of decline. When Tom's Bruce Almightybombed last year, I don't remember anyone asking how the man who brought us Patch Adamscould sink so low.
If Night begun his career with Lady in the Waterhe would now be shaping into a director as reliably consistent as Hitchcock (or Shadyac).
