Almost, but not quite

Rating: 7/10 (22 June 2006)

There's quite a stigma surrounding M. Night Shyamalan's directorial style. At this point, he's made more bad movies than good, and for many people, it was Signs where he went off the rails.
That is definitely true.
But here's the deal, okay: for the first, say, 90 minutes of its 106 minute run time, Signs is actually a really, legitimately good movie. It very slowly builds a fantastic sense of dread. You feel intimately connected with these characters. The small, tiny glimpses you get of creatures are genuinely frightening.
If all you ever saw was the first 90 minutes of Signs, you'd be convinced that M. Night is an under-appreciated genius. I unabashedly LOVE those 90 minutes.
But then you get to the last 10 minutes. The movie goes to pull the brakes, and the lever snaps off. What follows, obviously, is a trainwreck. The movie gets to its "message," the trademark M. Night "big twist," and it is absurd and convenient to an almost offensive degree. Every shred of good will built up by this movie is obliterated. There are no survivors. The last 10 minutes almost feel like they fell out of a different movie.
But it's not from a different movie. Signs alludes to its forthcoming narrative suicide all over the place. It might "make sense" in the context of what the movie is obviously trying to say, but that doesn't mean it is any less ridiculous.
I want to love Signs. I almost kind of do, still. But it is really hard to pretend that those last 10 minutes do not exist.