More happening than you’d think

If I’ve been asked once, I’ve been asked 500 times: What the hell happened to M. Night Shyamalan’s career?

Well, what happened was that he started getting pretentious and self-indulgent with his stories and characters. That doesn’t mean he’s making bad movies, it just means he’s not making the movies that fans of “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs” want to see.

His latest much-maligned work is “The Happening,” in which critics and audiences complained about awkward dialogue, hackneyed acting and characters not doing much else besides running from ominous gusts of wind.

What I saw was a frightening movie about one of the many ways mankind could meet its end, this time by way of nature purging us from the planet. It’s a story I can’t remember seeing on film before, and for that alone Shyamalan gets creativity points.

The director also concocts several scenes that are truly chilling, proving he’s still got style where it counts. Mark Wahlberg does occasionally fumble with a script that hits some quirky notes, and Zooey Deschanel, all gorgeous eyes and agape mouth, is mostly wasted as Wahlberg’s wandering wife.

“The Happening” is all about tone, and its human characters are just hapless victims of nature’s fury. Of course, this is coming from a guy who loved “The Village” and respected “Lady in the Water” for what it aspired to be (a children’s fable).

Don’t be fooled by the promise of “over one hour of intense footage not shown in theatres” plastered on the DVD cover. It’s more like three minutes of extreme excised footage and an hour of stuff that was cut for time and plot progression.

Aside from those three minutes that would have better served the film by being included, seen in the “Hard Cut” featurette, this one-disc edition offers a brief making-of doc and some throwaway pieces on composing a scene and parsing Shyamalan’s sometimes puzzling dialogue.

The best mini-doc is “A Day for Night,” where the director’s journeyman work ethic is put on display.

Haters will hate, but I’ll keep following Shyamalan’s career with great interest. The more he keeps confounding mass audiences, the more I’ll be paying attention.