sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Rating: Null/10 (24 April 2004)

Have you ever wondered about all those crop circles, or who made them, or why? Neither have we, but if you're just itching to know, this pretentious loser of a film will clue you in. Written, produced, directed, and, in part, actually filmed (here we go again!) by M. Night Shyamalan, this dreadful tubesteak of a movie would have you believe that aliens, who periodically come to Earth to harvest humans, and are bright enough to navigate across tens or hundreds of lightyears, actually need roadmaps scratched in the dirt once they get here to help them locate human population centers! You GOTTA be kidding. As if this weren't enough, we poor humans can eavesdrop on their sinister plans by using AM band baby monitors, and, as it turns out, can defeat them by using squirt guns and garden hoses! To say that this strains credulity would be an understatement of near-Biblical proportions. Mel Gibson stars as a recently single, recently defrocked minister who's trying to raise his two young sons and, by all appearances, his brother as well. Okay, we'll buy that, except for the fact that Gibson, who is normally a fine actor, goes through this entire movie displaying all the range of emotion of a heavily sedated hospital patient. Even the use of the word "movie" is something of a stretch, as "Signs" is very little more than a three act play that almost certainly would have done better on the live stage. Shyamalan evidently thinks of himself as some sort of latter-day Hitchcock, employing as he does scenes and camerawork that are very Hitchcockian in appearance -- but not substance. Take our word for it: Hitchcock he ain't, nor can we, in good conscience, recommend this film. To be blunt, it stinks.