Evil, evil everywhere; let’s go snoop around.

That seems to be the marketing hook of “The Reaping,” a tedious, underwhelming hodgepodge of a film that manages somehow both to suck the awesomeness out of the 10 biblical plagues and confuse the basic order of good and evil.

Worse, the film, which opens in the city tomorrow (not on Good Friday, mind you) makes a mockery of the considerable acting talents of Hilary Swank (who somehow thought a script involving her hunting down a little girl with a knife would help her break into the mainstream) and Stephen Rea (who does little more than bark dogmatic threats into a cell phone).

To simply detail the movie’s plot points is to fail to acknowledge just how lazily, and insultingly, they are stitched together, using the allure of religion, Satan, and the apocalypse as a crutch to disguise incompetence. And so it’s worth noting: “The Reaping” is not just bad — it’s offensive.

Before the story takes a nosedive into blood-soaked rivers, head lice, and children’s skulls, we are confronted with a much more pragmatic, realistic conflict of faith vs. reason. Katherine Winter (Ms. Swank), who eventually evolves from a prim, sensible professor to a dressed down, bawling, bewildered believer, is a woman who debunks all things mystical. In a lecture to students at Louisiana State University (which director Stephen Hopkins, the force behind “Predator 2,” oddly introduces as if we were watching an episode of “C.S.I.,” complete with scene identifiers), she travels to wherever people see miracles and debunks them as scientific coincidences or hallucinations.

In the film’s most fascinating, and all-too-brief, scene, she also explains away all the biblical plagues — how a hailstorm was likely mistaken for fire raining down from the heavens, how algae was mistaken for a bloody river, how high winds brought a flock of locusts, etc. She is a skeptic to the extreme — one of those movie creations that just needs a good scare or two to set her straight.

These scares come in the form of the quaint town of Haven. The river has run red, the townsfolk (it’s impressive how “The Reaping” somehow both talks up and ridicules the South) are scared, and they are blaming the young girl who was found next to the river-bound corpse of her brother. She did something to her brother, they say, and now God is angry.

Katherine, though, is not convinced. Aided by her devout research assistant, Ben (Idris Elba), she’s welcomed with open arms by the aw-shucks, so-nice-you-just-know-he’s-bad-underneath local (David Morrissey) who puts Katherine up in his mansion, cooks her dinner (when maggots aren’t swarming, another one of the plagues), and asks her to help defend this little girl before the mob kills her.

What unfolds from there could best be described as a chaotic, ever-accelerating collage of the morbid and the mystical. As Katherine digs for clues, one plague leads to another. There’s blood and there’s falling frogs; there’s locusts and lice and dying cows. The more she sees, the more skeptical she becomes of her scientific theories, and the more agitated Haven’s population becomes, the more her focus drifts to this mysterious little girl at the center of it all.

In a testament to how uncreative and uninspired this production is, the 10 plagues are constantly saddled by a variety of flashbacks, death-defying close calls, and bad dreams designed to spike the tension. Beyond that, we’re given a back-story designed to help us understand Katherine’s tortured past that manages to work in the terrors of Darfur, evoking the horrors of families starving and children slaughtered. As for the more mundane, Mr. Hopkins shows a certain ingenious talent for imbuing everything from a semi truck to a teapot, a laptop, and even a walkie-talkie with a sinister edge.

More than anything else, “The Reaping” is plagued by a short attention span, overcompensating for its shallowness by advocating a strategy of overloading the audience. For those who believe in the Bible and the rapture, there’s something dramatic about these scriptures of good vs. evil and something awe-inspiring about the prospect of the world’s end. “The Reaping” sketches out this apocalyptic outline but forgets to fill in the cliché with anything of substance. Never have so many locusts meant so little.