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It’s official! We’ve evidently run out of ethnic groups to blame for our planets’ ills. It appears that the time has come for us human bullies to pick on the one group that can’t fight back - the environment. Or can they?  Let’s go ask Al Gore, maybe he has the answer or at least a clue.

Director M. Night Shyamalan’s new thriller is hardly thrilling at all. It opens under a Koyaanisqatsi sky with clouds that move with increasing velocity while morphing into ominous cumulonimbus. We’re in New York City (so far so good), when the people in Central Park start acting a little weird. Nothing strange about that! Until (spoiler alert!) the wind comes roaring through and the very same dog-walking, book-reading, life-loving folks start committing suicide, one-by–one in gruesome detail.  What the hell is going on here?

Suspense continues to build (And just how do I know that? Because Oscar nominated composer James Newton Howards score tells me so!) with a spectacular scene of a dozen construction workers (no spoiler alert here – you’ve seen it in the trailer a dozen times) falling to their death in an odd contemporary ballet from the roof of a high-rise under construction. 

Cut to a classroom in Philadelphia where Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg) is teaching high school science to a class of disinterested students. But we learn (along with the students) the scientific process and take comfort in knowing that the information will come in handy later. And indeed it does!

Elliot is married to Alma (Zooey Deschanel) a wide-eyed beauty who is contemplating an affair after sharing some tiramisu with a co-worker (and she thinks she has problems now – just wait!). They’re best friends with Julian, the math teacher (John Leguizamo) who will accompany them (along with Julian’s daughter Jess) on a journey to outrun an unseen but deadly threat.

Along the way they meet up with various characters that all have theories about what is or is not causing folks to short circuit their survival instinct. I’m still not sure if the villain was the trees or the grass and why it started in New York of all places and then jumps the Atlantic. Did I miss some political statement? But there is an inordinate amount of running to and fro in large groups and in small, until they figure out what is happening.

This is not a movie for the squeamish as there are some very gruesome moments involving lions in the zoo and heavy-duty machinery meeting up with body parts, but it is also peppered with small doses of humor as well.

I do give Shyamalan credit for his little casting flourishes. Betty Buckley has a small but powerful role as the out-of-touch–with–reality-and-doesn’t-know-what-hits-her-until-it-hits-her paranoid old lady, the polar opposite of her Tony winning performance as Grizabella, the Glamour Cat in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats.  And Alan Ruck, who played the role of a high school student in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off has now graduated to high school principal. But my favorite is M. Night’s role – which you’ll just have to be on the lookout for. Don’t be upset if you don’t catch it until the final credits glide across the screen.

And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to water my plants right now, lest they get any ideas about their lack of care. “Hey, gorgeous – don’t you look shiny and green today?” I’m just not taking any chances.

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