It’s been downhill for filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan after his breakout hit, “The Sixth Sense,” that even got several Oscar nominations. Except for “Signs,” his subsequent works like “Unbreakable”, “The Village” and “Lady in the Water” got worse and worse, reaching its nadir in “The Happening,” his most non-sensical movie so far. It might please environmentalists like Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio in that it presents itself as an ecological thriller where Mother Earth gets back at negligent humans, but moviegoers looking for exciting entertainment will be bored to death while watching it.

The movie starts ominously at 8:30 a.m. in Central Park where a girl is horrified when she sees her friend sitting beside her on a bench suddenly stabbing her own neck. Construction workers in a nearby building then start throwing themselves from the roof. Other people in the area suddenly stop walking and start killing themselves while the leaves of the nearby trees flutter in the wind to give a clue on what’s causing the phenomenon of people committing mass suicide.

The action then shifts to Philadelphia. Elliott Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is a schoolteacher with a problematic marriage to his addled wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel, who looks like a young Rosanna Roces). While he’s teaching in class, their principal calls him and they have an emergency meeting with other faculty members. They’re informed that people in New York are dropping dead and the initial explanation is that it’s a bio-terrorist attack.

The students are sent home immediately and Elliott and his wife take the train to go as far as possible from the airborne threat that is enveloping almost all of the Northeastern part of the U.S. With them is Elliott’s co-teacher, Julian (John Leguizamo) and his 8-year- old daughter (Ashlyn Sanchez). The trouble is that their train conks out in a small town called Filbert where most of them got stranded. Julian chooses to go back and get the wife he has left behind and leaves his daughter under the care of Elliott and Alma. In no time at all, he also becomes a victim of the deadly entity that is attacking people.

Confused and scared, Elliott and Alma then join other people escaping from the impending catastrophe and they see a lot of dead people along the way even if they don’t have a sixth sense. Since Elliott is a science teacher who’s earlier shown worried about the alarming decline of the population of bees, he correctly figures out that the deadly toxins are coming out from trees and plants (and they show more wind effects ruffling tree leaves and branches with only minimal creepy effect on the audience.) A TV anchor then explains how this happens in detail by saying it affects the neuro-transmitters in our nervous system, which all come out as so much silly mumbo-jumbo.

Elliott, Alma and the little girl then seek shelter in an isolated little house, just like the characters in “Signs” when the aliens attack, except that it’s inhabited by a deranged old woman (Betty Buckley) who seems as insane than the filmmaker who did this movie. After a while, we started wishing that all the dead people outside the house will spring back to life and, like zombies from the “Night of the Living Dead” series, attack the three remaining survivors inside the house, just to inject some excitement into the very cumbersome proceedings.

Viewers who are expecting a jolting surprise twist in the end will be very much disappointed as the ending that shows the happening also occurring in another country has already been used in similar films, like “28 Weeks Later.” It’s really a lot of buildup but with no satisfying pay off.

Shyamalan does not make a cameo appearance in this movie like what he has done before in his previous works, but his voice is heard as the guy named Joey who’s flirting with Alma even if he knew that she’s already married.

We honestly don’t know why Mark Wahlberg, a reasonably talented actor who even got an Oscar nomination for “The Departed”, accepted this ridiculous project. At times, he is made to look so weird, delivering lines that he obviously does not believe in so he just has this perpetual furrows on his forehead and brow. Both he and Deschanel try hard to emote well, but their respective roles are just so underwritten there’s no way at all that we can sympathize with them.

The movie actually reminds us of those sci-fi movies of the 50s about unfounded paranoia, like the “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” or even some episodes in “Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchock Presents,” except that “The Happening” offers no scenes of nail-biting tension or suspense but will only make you yawn. It will surely be clobbered easily at the box office by the more thrilling summer releases in the US, what with it opening simultaneously with “The Incredible Hulk.”