Mark Wahlberg is a talented and likeable Hollywood A-lister. However, even he himself would probably admit that his filmography is a mixed bag, to put it mildly.

On the one hand, he’s been in plenty of fantastic feature films. Although Wahlberg has retrospectively regretted starring in Boogie Nights, it remains his finest hour as an actor.

Many of his other movies, such as The Departed, The Fighter and Lone Survivor, have also been smash hits that really showed off his chops as a serious performer. Wahlberg is also a skilled comedic performer, as he proved in works such as the Ted series and The Other Guys.

On the other hand, though, the actor has played his part in a share of box office stinkers. Planet of the Apes, The Lovely Bones, Max Payne, Date Night, Pain & Gain, and two of Michael Bay’s Transformers sequels, to name but a few. To be fair to Wahlberg, his performance was adequate in quite a few of those aforementioned movies, but he doesn’t always seem to pick the right films to be in.

But what is the project he regrets the most? Sometimes, directors and actors surprise you when they reveal their biggest career regrets, but with Wahlberg, his choice for his most hated movie is not at all unexpected. It’s 2008’s The Happening, which is perhaps the most critically panned film in his career and arguably features his worst performance to date.

Wahlberg seems to have signed onto the film mainly because he wanted to work with director M. Night Shyamalan. The project also gave him an opportunity to play against type as he took up the role of a science teacher. As a result, it was at least a break from playing cops or crooks.

Unfortunately, the film itself is a complete turkey. A bizarre, puzzlingly misguided horror flick that literally doesn’t have a single scare and is absolutely broken on a narrative level.

Wahlberg himself gives an absolutely bewildering performance, delivering meme-worthy bad acting all the way through. It’s a performance so infamous that it was later parodied on SNL. If Wahlberg’s retrospective comments are anything to go by, he was more than aware that the film would end up being a flop.

When promoting The Fighter, he revealed that his co-star Amy Adams had nearly appeared in The Happening, too. Evidently embarrassed as hell, Wahlberg said: “She dodged the bullet.

And then I was still able to…I don’t want to tell you what movie…alright, The Happening. Fuck it. It is what it is. Fucking trees, man. The plants. Fuck it. You can’t blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher. At least I wasn’t playing a cop or a crook.”

Shyamalan himself seems to be aware that the film was a misfire, though he addressed it rather differently to Wahlberg.

Contradicting past statements not long before release, Shyamalan said that The Happening was always intended to be a B-movie that wasn’t designed to be taken too seriously. This statement seemed like the director was trying to save face, as The Happening very much feels like a movie that tried to be serious but ultimately turned into an unintentional comedy.