It shifts from stunning and beautiful to incredibly tacky with surprising ease.

Rating: Null/10 (3 August 2002)

***Possible spoilers***
I went into this movie with very high hopes - M. Night Shymalan, Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, cute kids (one of them a Culkin), intriguing premise...how could you go wrong? I loved Sixth Sense, though forgot that I didn't like Unbreakable, and found myself really loving Signs through the vast majority of it. It's funny through the dead-pan moments, it's intellectual through the spiritual moments, and it's freaky as all hell.
So imagine my dismay when the ending rolls around, and it's simply terrible. I don't want to spoil too much, but the ending was not in the same class as The Sixth Sense or even Unbreakable. I kept waiting for the surprise - and got nothing. I felt like I was being led on this bizarre path, waiting to see it all tie up perfectly, and being left with an ambiguity that doesn't even approach the delicious stun Shymalan gives us in his other movies. The flashbacks rolled and I wracked my brain for the twist ending. Nothing. The ending was cheap and even tacky - it was as if he gave us this masterpiece of a movie, and then threw on a typical Hollywood ending. Personally, it would have been classier to not show us the aliens at all, keeping our ignorance at the same level as the family's. But there were so many unanswered questions, about the supposed invasion, the family itself, the "bad feelings." The storylines ended rapidly, with the only twist being wea k and fairly predictable. Ambiguity is one thing, a lousy ending is another - I walked out of the theater thoroughly disappointed. I couldn't even enjoy the intellectual buzz I'd been anticipating.