Oy, Egoyan!

You think Simon being on a bus as it passes his uncle in a pivotal conversation with his uncle and his French teacher is a coincidence?

That’s nothing compared to the staggering, mind-blowing and frankly movie-ruining coincidence that is revealed just a few scenes later.

Truth be told, “Adoration” was a goner long before that. The latest film from Atom Egoyan runs fatally off the rails in the early going and crashes into a chasm long before the coincidences come along that would destroy even a good movie.

The Canadian filmmaker’s best efforts, such as the haunting “Exotica” and the crushing yet optimistic “The Sweet Hereafter,” weave a magical spell from disparate, unlikely ingredients that are brought together as if by alchemy in ways never before seen.

The ingredients in “Adoration” are disparate, all right, but they don’t seem to fit together at all. It is as if Egoyan started out with one idea, didn’t know what to do with it, and let the story meander aimlessly until it finally found an ending.

A movie about a terrorist who sends his pregnant, unsuspecting wife on an airplane with a bomb turns into a story about a woman becoming a surrogate mother (the literary kind, not the giving-birth kind) and a teen seeking assurance that his parents were in love. Needless to say, the terrorist story is much more interesting.

Egoyan is not above making movies about people in extremis -- a kidnapped, murdered girl in “Exotica,” a fatal school bus accident in “The Sweet Hereafter” -- but in this film he takes the road that turns out to be quite justifiably less traveled.

Devon Bostick stars as Simon, a Toronto high school student whose French teacher reads aloud a magazine story about how Israeli agents famously foiled a hijacking attempt involving a woman who did not know she was carrying a bomb. The article is just being read for translation, but Simon shocks his class by saying that it was his mother with the bomb, his father who sent her and that he was their unborn child.

For a while, there is some question of whether he is telling the truth or if he is making it up as a way to tell the story from a different perspective. Egoyan might have found some success had he continued along this path, though one doubts this subplot could sustain a whole movie. But instead he starts showing people talking philosophically about the questions raised in his story in video chatrooms on his laptop.

If there is anything less compelling in a movie than people sitting down and unconvincingly discussing ideas, it is people doing so by staring into a computer.

Arsinee Khanjian -- Egoyan’s wife -- stars as the French teacher whose actions become increasingly irrational, though I don’t believe we are supposed to see her that way. Scott Speedman, whom you wouldn’t immediately pick to play a serious role in a serious movie, co-stars as Simon’s uncle, a tow-truck driver.

The scenes between the teacher and the uncle are the movie’s most important, but they are the worst in conception and execution. The actors aren’t up to the rigors of the roles, and the script lets down the characters.

At his best, Egoyan is positively masterful. But watching “Adoration” is absolute agony.