If at second and third and fourth you fail: fail, fail, again.

Rating: 5/10 (15 June 2008)

The premise of the movie is well worth pursuing: "It's not nice to fool with with mother nature!" Unfortunately M. Night Shyamalan is not up to it.
Something is affecting the human race, or at least in the North East section, and it makes them kill themselves. We get to see gore and shock and awe (MNS has decided to get with our need for explicit violence), and for a while it looks like a WMD attack. Then it becomes something more difficult to grasp: it's nature, and she's p.o'd at us for global warming.
Mark Wahlberg plays a nerdy school teacher, and it's difficult to watch him struggle to get into the skin of the character. As an actor he's best at showing us pent up anger, frustrated rage, and sociopathy. As a dweeb he just seems lost. In fact all the characters in this soap opera seem lost. I get why the Director wants to show "average people," but "boring" people? He's married to a borderline, who's self involved and immature, and his friend (John Leguizamo) decides to let him know this at the outset of the movie. Why? Who knows! The end of the world seems a little more pressing than marital dynamics.
Everybody heads to the countryside, because someone deems it's safer, and yet nature seems to track them down and get them in bunches. Naturally we end up with just Mark, his wife and Leguizamo's daughter, holed up in an old lady recluses home. MNS decides to unleash Betty Buckley as a Norma Bates clone on the trio, but luckily she's felled by the suicide spores and has the funniest suicide scene in recent memory.
This is not a horror movie, but it is pretty horrible to watch MNS descend once again into adolescent movie making. He's absorbed Hitchcock and King and resurrected himself as Wes Craven with a bigger budget.
Shyamalan has had his shot at this subject matter and now hopefully someone with a better gift for making it look realistic and worth watching will get a chance.