AS THEY say in the classics, if you don't want to know the score, look away now.

In this case I'm not talking about Italy v Brazil or Carlton v Essendon but writer/director M. Night Shyamalan's (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village) latest cinematic dalliance, The Happening.

I suppose when I started writing this column I was worried that it might be a bit of a "spoiler", because I meant to give away key plot points.

But what was I worried about? Shyamalan manages to spoil this film all by himself.

To boil down the already thin broth that passes here for a plot; nature gets pissed off and decides to release a nasty neurotoxin into the atmosphere through trees and other vegetation that causes hundreds of folk from New York to Pennsylvania to promptly top themselves.

I'd have felt the same way if I'd read this script.

Of course we don't get to find out that ferocious flora is in fact the "root" cause of all the trouble until those bothersome terrorists have been wrongly blamed, and a Don Burke-esque nurseryman with a terrible hunch decides to flee for his life in the same direction as our hero, science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg).

If Shyamalan (who self-absorbingly wrote, produced and directed this) set out to make a slick doomsday suspense piece with a serious socio-political message about global warming being humankind's eventual undoing, this film fails spectacularly on both counts, being as cutting as a rubber knife and as suspenseful as an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond.

In one scene, as Wahlberg and Co. flee the invisible air-born spores, they run past a sign advertising a new housing estate that "cryptically" sermonises "You deserve this!" Wow. Pretty heavy stuff.

Ultimately, the film also disappoints as a suspense flick because the menace here, is a nameless, tasteless, odourless, colourless and invisible agent that Shyamalan can only lamely represent by using wind to blow the grass around.

Shyamalan is asking plenty if he expects us to believe that a few actors frolicking in the fresh, crisp and inviting green hills of Pennsylvania are actually in grave danger.

Ooooo the environment ... scary.

The stunning revelation that large groups of people help trigger the bushes to release this killer toxin, prompting them to thin out a bit, is just another ridiculous plot point.

Unless you believe trees can count.

And if this film was supposed to strengthen the case against climate change skepticism it fails miserably here too.

Save the trees? What for! Those leafy bastards are trying to kill us!

What's really scary here is that movie studios continue to give the hit-and-miss Shyamalan obscene amounts of money to realise his half-baked visions.

According to this piece in Variety, several studios refused to touch this project, which Shyamalan had first called The Green Effect prompting the director to head home to re-write to script.
He should have tried harder.

As many of his critics have said for years, maybe it's time Shyamalan started branching out and found himself a decent screenwriter.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.