It’s become rather fashionable of late to criticize M. Night Shyamalan, and despite the indiscriminate nature of much of the bashing, it’s not that difficult to see why.

I, like many others, became an instant fan of Shyamalan with his breakout The Sixth Sense, and although I am in the distinct minority here, I loved Unbreakable as well. Signs had its share of cheese, but still managed to hit a lot of right notes. But something happened with The Village. The surprise ending shtick was getting old.

The more critics and audiences started to pay attention to Shyamalan, the more they realized just how pretentious this guy was. Watch an interview with him – he doesn’t try very hard to hide the fact that he thinks he’s awesome. After Lady in the Water, which has Shyamalan playing a character who is destined to write the book that will radically change the entire world, suspicions were confirmed. Now, I’ve never met the guy, but the megalomaniac label seems to apply at least a teensy bit.

So, with Shyamalan disillusionment having swept the nation, The Happening happens on the scene, with Twentieth Century Fox proclaiming loudly that it’s the first R-rated flick from this modern master of suspense.

As a side note, the R rating is nothing more than a publicity scam. Despite the filmmakers’ giddy assertions on one of the DVD featurettes that they “went for the hard R” this is a film that owes that rating solely to one or two scenes that barely pass snuff as graphic in this day and age.

The Happening successfully comes across as the B-movie that Shyamalan is aiming for (it’s similar to Signs in that regard,) but it’s based on a premise that is utterly ridiculous and deserves the scores of derision it’s already received.

This is a film that doesn’t depend on its actors much, so Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel don’t make much of an impression as Elliot and Alma, the couple with marital problems who are on the run from a mysterious “event” that’s causing people in the northeast U.S. to off themselves.

The mass suicide phenomenon provides Shyamalan with plenty of excuses to come up with creative self-inflicted deaths. It’s one of the few things he does reasonably well for much of the movie, although some, like a man being mauled to death by lions that looks like it was Monty Python-inspired, don’t come off as well.