Mother Earth Hates You

Rating: 3/10 (13 June 2008)

I was really looking forward to this movie. I loved all M.Night Shyamalan's other movies.
I should have been tipped off by the trailer when they said it's "his first R-rated movie ever!" Huh? Why is that supposed to be a draw? It turns out the R-rating is well-deserved.
This movie has two major flaws:
1. It's unnecessarily gruesome. Very little was left to the imagination.
2. It's pedestrian. There were no surprises. About two-thirds of the way through the picture, the viewer can put two and two together. It's a see-through plot if there ever was one. In the end, it was just another unoriginal flick of the enviro-apocalyptic strain of disaster movies. Humanity is a blot on the planet, Mother Earth's natural defenses are barfing us up, blah, blah, blah. Funny how movies like this seem to materialize during election years.
This is well beneath what one would expect from Shyamalan. But hey, the trailer says it's R-rated, so it's got to be good, right? It's never been done before...by Shyamalan. Unfortunately, it's been done by plenty of others. Think The Core or The Day After Tomorrow. It was as good either one--which is to say it wasn't.