VERY DISAPPOINTED WITH "SIGNS"!:

Rating: 6/10 (3 August 2002)

After all the hype, the waiting, the anticipation, etc,....this film simply DOES NOT deliver the goods. I'd give it a 6.9 on the high side as a more than complimentary gesture. My wife gave it a 1.0.
The theater was packed and this movie will sucker a lot of people in for a few days (probably $40 mil+ weekend gross), but then the word-of-mouth will make it drop like a rock quickly thereafter. I saw NO ONE who seemed thrilled by the film at the end. No buzz. No chatter. No excitement. Walked kind of limply out of the theater. Most seemed, like me and my wife, to be disappointed and left kind of hanging a bit.
Script is often slow, a bit dull and, at times, muddled up. Acting is "OK" to good....nothing spectacular. It delivers just a very few suspenseful moments (about 3 or 4 tops) that perhaps 8 people (mostly under 12) in the whole audience screamed at. This hype of it being a "very scary", "edge of your seat", "jump out of your seat" film is just not true except as I've said above. And the claim that M.N.S. is "the next Spielberg" is a TOTAL joke!!! M.N.S. has NOTHING in common with Spielberg AT ALL! If anything, M.N.S. is more like Rod Serling or Hitchcock in that he tries to deliver surprise elements (even if getting there is very slowly paced). Even in his best film, "THE SIXTH SENSE", the writing gets slow and dull during the first half or so...you know how M.N.S. is....but it paid off BIG TIME in the final resolution, as we all know. "SIGNS" has a LOT of the M.N.S. type of dullness and slowness throughout a lot of the film, but you TRUST that he WILL, in fact, lead the film down to another great resolve, etc,.....but it just does not deliver on that trust. And that will be enough to see this rating drop along with its gross. I predict it will end up with about a 6.5-7.0 rating at best and a domestic gross of about $140 mil-$160 mil with a total WW gross of about $250 mil-$275 mil.
I wanted to like it...I'm a HUGE fan of "THE SIXTH SENSE" (I'd rate it a 10). I like M.N.S. and Mel Gibson a lot. By the way, "SIGNS" also seems to be somewhat of a "WAR OF THE WORLDS" rip-off in a couple of regards as well as a rip-off of other films. To me, it was nothing more than a much better than average flick (most flicks REALLY suck these days!), but I expected a major blockbuster. If you plan on dropping $40-$70 to take your family to this thing, you WILL NOT get your money's worth. Take a smaller group to a matinee or wait for DVD (which I'm sure will add footage and alternate endings), I am VERY sorry to say.
__JUGGERNAUT__