Thematically Frayed; Unintegrated

Rating: 1/10 (22 September 2002)

Despite the glowing receptions, both critically and popularly, for "Signs", M. Night Shyamalan's third descent into the underworld of horror thrillers, I was ultimately disappointed by his laughable take on the phenomenon of crop circles. As far as I'm concerned, out of all the movies Shyamalan has made, only one, "Sixth Sense" (1999), has actually succeeded in raising demons, let alone eyebrows, for me; and even "Sixth Sense", stylish as it was, was quickly outdone in two years by Alejandro Amenabar's genuinely terrifying reworking of the gothic ghost story genre, "The Others"(2001).
It's sad to see a sci-fi thriller with potential like "Signs" flop into a banal puddle of theistic pop-psychobabble and jejune derivations from "War of the Worlds". The first half of "Signs" was slightly creepy and chilling due to an unnervingly tense atmosphere, and it seemed that Shyamalan is sticking to his tried-and-true method of scaring his audiences with what they can't see, rather than what they can. But when the not-so-little green men began popping out of the cornfield; and Mel Gibson - thinly disguised as an Anglican minister-turned-atheist - with his whiny, snot-nosed offspring, was forced to retreat to the cellar of his dismal farmhouse to escape the inevitable, it became sadly clear that the final confrontation would not produce a suitably chilling "whodunit?" surprise ending, typical of "Sixth Sense" and "The Others", but rather a preachy, self-satisfied response to the question of whether Mel Gibson will regain his lost faith. Uninspired and lackluster.