Windy.(The Happening)(Movie review)

FOR the world's dwindling band of M. Night Shyamalan admirers--a group in which I still count myself, though increasingly reluctantly--the best-case scenario for his latest film, The Happening, was that it would represent a return to form after his disastrous previous effort, Lady in the Water. The second-best scenario was that it would turn out to be an enormous box-office dud, a failure so abject and total that Shyamalan would be forced to cede creative control over his next few projects, subordinating his inflated self-image to the rigors of collaboration and the discipline of pleasing someone other than himself.

The first scenario was not to be, but Shyamalan did his part to make the latter a reality. The Happening is an outrageously, laughably awful movie, an instant camp classic if there ever was one: Imagine if Ed Wood had set out to remake Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and you'll have a general idea of its level of atrociousness. But the ticket-buying public didn't hold up their end of the bargain. The reservoirs of Shyamaphilia built up by such crowd-pleasing hits as The Sixth Sense and Signs proved deep enough to deliver The Happening a $30 million opening weekend--no great shakes, but hardly abject failure. Which means in turn that someone, somewhere, will no doubt roll the dice and allow Shyamalan creative control over whatever movie he wants to write and direct next--keeping him, however temporarily, from the sort of reckoning with his own folly that he so desperately needs.

Wherever he goes from here, though, it's hard to imagine how Shyamalan could do worse than the dreadful one-two punch he's just delivered. Lady in the Water was a ponderous bedtime story, in which a daily mythology populated by what sounded like rejects from the Star Wars cantina--narfs, scrunts, the Tartutic, the Great Etalon--was layered atop Shyamalan's still-daffier decision to cast himself as a young writer whose work was prophesied to change the world. His new film is less hubristic but worse in almost every other way. It's a mediocre Twilight Zone conceit stretched (and stretched, and stretched) to fill 90 minutes, with performances that would embarrass a dinner-theater troupe and a script to match.

You can tell that Shyamalan set out to make a taut, scary B-movie, which--after the longueurs of Lady in the Water--might have been a good idea on his part. But The Happening is closer to a D-movie: Its target audience seems to be the heckling robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and the only thing that's scary about it is the fact that three talented actors--Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, and John Leguizamo--actually thought that appearing in this fiasco would be a good career move.

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Wahlberg plays Elliot Moore, a science teacher who's happy in the classroom but struggling in his marriage to Alma (Deschanel); his best friend is Julian (Leguizamo), who teaches math just ...