“The Happening” weds a great premise to the worst script M. Night Shyamalan has ever written. Worse than “The Village,” which is actually fairly intriguing until the third act. Worse than “Lady in the Water,” which was at least an original folly. “The Happening” script is bad in a ham-fisted, amateurish way that makes you want to shake Shyamalan by the lapels and say, “Dude, I’m telling you this as a friend. You’re blowing a good thing.” Part of the problem lies with the casting. Instead of Bruce Willis or Mel Gibson to provide the much-needed gravitas, lisping milquetoast Marky Mark, wildly miscast as an ineffectual science teacher, is expected to carry M. Night’s water for him, along with Zooey Deschanel as his equally milquetoast wife, and a milquetoast child actress who has only one scene where she shows anything close to real emotion (from a distance).

The movie’s best scene is its opener, carelessly ruined in the trailers: one morning in Central Park everyone simply stops moving or talking. Then they systematically kill themselves. In some cases really systematically, which is a bit surprising following the loss of motor skills and thought processes, but the Happening doesn’t affect groups at a consistent rate and victims don’t assist others in offing themselves. Some folks just stand around and wait calmly for a loaded gun to become available. Some get quite creative, like the one who climbs into a closed-off zoo pen and offers lions a chance to tear his arms off (although offering them his head would seem to be a more logical choice). One guy activates a big power-mower and manages to set it buzzing around at just the right vector for it to run over his sprawled body. This orderliness may be a bit goofy, but it’s also creepy and we like creepy.


Less convincing is the behavior adopted by the unaffected. Wahlberg first learns about the crisis when his principal interrupts his class and brings him to a secret cabal with the other faculty, although you’d expect mobs of parents to already be storming the school. Though it clearly has to be an airborne neurotoxin, there’s never any talk of staying indoors or donning gas-masks. Instead, Wahlberg and his vaguely estranged honey Zooey Deschanel hook up with Wahlberg’s buddy John Leguizamo and get on a train to Harrisburg, which mysteriously comes to a halt out in the middle of nowhere. When Wahlberg alone of all the stranded passengers bothers to approach the huddled conductors, they break off their own chat and ominously inform him that they’ve “lost contact.” With whom? “Everyone.” In the world? The station they’re headed to? The science teacher doesn’t bother asking any follow-ups.

Next, these hundreds of refugees crowd into a diner. The fry cook turns on the TV and tells them all to listen up, even though he hasn’t heard what’s about to be revealed. The newscaster announces that the suicides have spread throughout the Northeast, with cities being affected “first,” which is pretty deductive considering it’s only been a couple of hours so far. Suddenly the power to the diner inexplicably goes out and everybody tramps outside, even though the diner’s right in the midst of the infected region, to take off in cars that materialize out of nowhere. Except Wahlberg and his wife, who foolishly were the only ones on the whole train not to bring a car along. Luckily, some hippie we’ve never seen before pulls up right then and offers to drive them up the road. This stranger waits patiently idling while John Leguizamo makes the driver of his car wait patiently so he can foist his six-year-old daughter off on Wahlberg and his wife, even though Leguizamo supposedly can’t stand the wife. Why would the kid be safer with Wahlberg? Maybe because Leguizamo knows his own character dies in every movie*. Where the hell’s Leguizamo going? He needs to leave because he heard his wife was on her way to Princeton and everyone’s dead there. So off he goes, and dies in transit because no one noticed there was a hole in the car-roof, even though it’s sizable enough for wind to whistle through. Actually, they might have the windows down anyway; it’s hard to tell since M. Night shoots everything in close-up, including Leguizamo ruining the final moments of his child seatmate by inflicting a math problem on her.

Meanwhile, Wahlberg and Co. continue driving and/or trudging around outdoors. At one point Wahlberg brakes the car, sees a bunch of bodies blocking the road about twenty meters ahead, and gets out to look. Apparently dead bodies mark the fringe of airborne contagions. They meet a (comically?) spastic Army private and some other people to die offscreen later. One woman raises her daughter on her cell phone; she puts her on speaker so everyone can hear her jump through a window to her death. “I hear wind,” Wahlberg notes helpfully.

The hippie, who’s obsessed with hot dogs even though he’s supposed to be plant-centric, explains to the presumably smart science teacher hero of the movie his theory that the neurotoxin is being released by vegetation as revenge against mankind for ruining the planet. Wait, wouldn’t those trees in Central Park have died without human maintenance? Thus having fulfilled his expository duties, the hippie promptly dies along with most of the refugees which M. Night just spent twenty minutes introducing to replace all the dispersed train refugees.

Wahlberg, his wife, and the token child who’s too cute to get killed off survive along with a pair of one-dimensional teenage boys by nobly having split off from the doomed group just before this, although at first it looks like they’ll die too because the Happening now abruptly takes the form of a slow-moving wind that bends grass-blades and branches to chase them. They try to outrun the wind but give up because outrunning wind would be too wacky even for a Shyamalan flick; it blows harmlessly past. Wahlberg arbitrarily concludes that it let them live because they were “a smaller group.” Wait, why would it spare them after chasing them? And wasn’t the chick who got killed over the cell phone by herself? And indoors? Maybe her house was made of wood, which is technically vegetable matter. Or maybe Wahlberg and Zooey’s acting is so “wooden,” it mistakes them for kindred. (Rimshot.)

Wahlberg presses on, heading into ever deeper greenery because they have to go “where there’s no people.” Wahlberg finds an abandoned truck and tells everyone to wait while he rummages inside it for a map. While rummaging, he turns the radio on so he can hear some more exposition, then turns it off when the exposition’s finished. He gets out of the truck and yells, “Look! There’s a house over there!” The others, who can already see it plainly, concur.

Although the two teenage boys Wahlberg’s now saddled with haven’t really been set up as willful or aggressive, they turn swiftly antagonistic against a houseful of surly farmers and are both shot to death. Actually, the second one doesn’t get shot until after Wahlberg sees a) the first kid get shot; b) a second rifle barrel poking from a nearby window and c) runs towards the second kid screaming, “JAAAAAAAMES!” in slow motion. Or maybe it’s “JAAAAAANE!” Hard to tell since we’ve never heard him say the kid’s name before.

Apparently leaving the two kids’ bodies on the porch to rot, Zooey and Wahlberg rediscover their love. Zooey admits to Wahlberg that she ate dessert with a guy named Joey who’s been calling her all day (probably to see if she’s alive or dead but screw him). Wahlberg takes it well, admitting that he bought cough syrup from a hot pharmacist once, so now they’re even. Zooey, baffled and disgusted: “Is that a joke?” (A line M. Night has probably heard a lot over the past few years.)

Finally, they reach a remote, ramshackle house presided over by a creepy old woman named Mrs. Jones. The crone is clearly batshit and dislikes them but they stay anyway. Though she’s already been set up as mean and weird, over the dinner-table, Mrs. Jones offers them some kindly, homespun, Depression-era romantic wisdom: “So which of you’s chasing who?” Wahlberg admits he’s the horny one, and everyone laughs. Mrs. Jones scowlingly invites them to stay the night.

The next morning Wahlberg awakes and hears Zooey and the bad child actress laughing somewhere. Ominous that either of them would be laughing after all the tragic shit they just went through; I'll bet there’s a scary payoff, maybe a new strain of Happening-virus that makes you laugh and act implausibly. Wahlberg wanders into a bedroom and finds a doll on a bed. He gets closer to it, calling it, “Mrs. Jones?” Mrs. Jones materializes right behind him, accusing him of wanting to steal her things and insisting that he and his ragtag bunch leave at once. Then she wanders off into her tomato garden to seal the deal. Where suddenly the Happening gets her, making her bash her head into all the windows while Wahlberg runs away, slamming doors and stuffing rugs in the cracks. He uses an old-fangled speaking-tube half-assedly set up earlier so he can tell Zooey and the bad child actress out in the shed catching frogs (that’s exclusively why they were laughing) to quickly shut all their windows and doors and stay inside. “Why?” Zooey asks, puzzled.

They talk through the speaking-tube for a couple minutes, then Wahlberg gets impatient and says that “if this is the end,” he wants to come out and see her and die, like a true soulmate. He goes outside as the music swells. She emerges to meet him, bringing the little girl along so she can die too. Luckily, though, the Happening ended just before then.

“Three months later”: life is understandably back to normal. Everything’s cool now between Wahlberg and Zooey because she’s preggers (so that’s what she meant by eating Joey’s dessert), and the little girl’s happy because her parents are dead and school’s back in. Obviously ecstatic about Zooey’s condition, Wahlberg turns on the TV. Oh boy, more talking heads for us to watch the hero watch. On the news (again), a science guy tells a skeptical news anchor that more “happenings” will ensue unless we start behaving nicely to the trees. (Hard to believe there’d still be a single non-plastic tree left anywhere within post-9/11 U.S. borders after all that but okay.) The skeptical news anchor tells the scientist that since the happening only happened in one place, it can clearly never happen again. Then, in the movie’s final shot, guess what happens in Paris. The moral of the story: the French are a bigger environmental menace than China or the rest of the U.S. The movie’s biggest reveal: an “act of nature that we’ll never understand.” You know, one of those unsolved mysteries like why the aliens in “Signs” didn’t come equipped with scuba gear or why Bruce Willis never noticed he was unbreakable for forty years or why a plane never once passed over “The Village.”

As Shyamalan offerings go, it probably holds up logic-wise about as well as any of his movies but it’s the first one he’s made with such drearily unsympathetic characters and tinny dialogue. Wahlberg’s protagonist is passive, indecisive, and whiny; he exhibits no intellectual curiosity about the happening and his only “brave” act at the end is really one of spineless resignation. It’s easy to believe that he never troubled to legally prosecute the slayers of the two kids under his wing. And his relationship with his wife is never fleshed out; they’re having undisclosed “problems” at the outset (though the two never bicker or give any sense of being sick of one another) just so they can reconcile at the end, and they acquire a little girl along the way presumably because watching a man, a woman, and a child run from a wind is more suspenseful than simply watching a man run alone. The most effective scenes are the suicides, which after the lawnmower bit Shyamalan begins discreetly cutting away from.

One of the movie's few big surprises perhaps is that no character ever tries to fight back by starting a forest fire. But the biggest question of all is how the same writer-director who crafted such a touching relationship between a kid and a ghost in his third movie, a kid and his dad in his fourth, and a priest and his brother in his fifth can't create even a single believable character by his eighth. Maybe early success broke his capacity for creative growth.

Or maybe it’s just an act of nature that we’ll never understand.

* Except “Super Mario Bros.”, unfortunately.