Are they serious...?

Rating: Null/10 (1 October 2002)

Some fine craft in the visual realisation and an excellent sense of pace fails to make anything out of a frankly laughable story. Am I missing the point here? Is the staggeringly banal dialogue and simplistic approach to faith actually a sly comment on the credulity of the audience? Or are we really - as I suspect - supposed to swallow this dull-witted stuff whole?

The writer/director can make a tense and engaging sequence, with a very nice sense of shading in performances, no doubt about that, but his technical facility isn't matched by his way with a story in this case. The hackneyed and bowel-numbingly predictable storyline, last seen circa 1970 in one act tv plays (told more economically and with equal tension by less self-important directors), goes exactly where it signals in the first five minutes, telling us nothing new on the way.
The script of Signs seems to me like an apprentice piece, and one that M Night would have been advised to leave in the bottom drawer. If he's running out of material, maybe it's time for M Night to direct someone else's story - I think he'd benefit both as director and as a writer.