Good Show/Bad Faith

Rating: Null/10 (7 August 2002)

This is one I'm in the middle on. I was certainly disappointed, so I can agree with most of the negative criticisms SIGNS has gotten. I'd have to say that I found the savage invective hurled against it here far more enjoyable than the movie.
On the other hand, I liked it. I expected something broader, more serious,more subtle, but in the end I at least got a pretty good old-fashioned monster movie. A few chuckles, loads of goosebumps. I'm not sure that it's fair to review movies as antitheses of expectations based on previous credits of the director, or comparisons to true classics of the genre Hitchcock etc... What's up there on the screen passes muster as good solid popcorny entertainment. Exquisitely moody cinematography, superstar charisma (but this has to be Mel's "gulpiest" performance outside of RANSOM)and a fine supporting performance by a peculiarly intriguing actor, can work magic on the drippiest of screenplays.
But boy, that religious business... Almost as ridiculous and out-of-touch as all those wimples and robes in SISTER ACT which real nuns hadn't worn in 25
years. A high school drop-out PLUMBER will lose faith in God over a squashed wife and express his idiosyncratic apostasy in the terms used here, not a theologically adept Reverend Father. In fact, a really up-to-date and with-it Rev would have taken a least a few pages from the God Is Dead School of Theology and not had too many "Father In Heaven, Eye on the Sparrow" notions to begin with. Also, coming face to face with Alien Beings would be a devastatingly UnBiblical experience for many believers, not an occasion to put extra oomph into the recital of Psalm 23. In any case, the "faith" which the Rev recovers is only the vaguest of intuitions, one more in line with unchurched agnosticism than with Being Saved in the John 3:16 sense. If you're basically on the same page only with Voltaire it's best not to go charging off in full clerical dress like Thomas a Becket...
Someone was listing movies SIGNS cribs from. How about THE BIRDS?