Signs point in wrong direction

Something has gone badly wrong with Signs. It looks rough and ready. It feels as if it was rushed into production and finished in a hell of a hurry. The acting is perfunctory and awkward. Its story is little more than an underweight tranche of Twilight Zone. Its contents - mystery crop circles, invading UFOs, spindly green aliens and beleaguered homesteaders nailing planks across their windows - are straight out of 1950s science fiction. Yet it's the third film of M Night Shyamalan, who proved himself in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable a master of extra-sensory minutiae and sophisticated spookiness. What can have gone so far amiss with his supernatural mix this time?

My own guess is that Signs was one of those films made with corner-cutting speed 18 months ago under the impending threat of the Hollywood writers' and artists' strike (which never happened), then had its parts given an opportunistic makeover after 9.11 to embellish it with a contemporary portentousness. Bad luck and bad judgment predictably result in a bad film: coarse-grained rather than fine-tuned, commonplace, narrow-focused and ill-jointed.

Mel Gibson plays a pastor who lost his faith - a bedroom wall shows where the crucifix used to hang - when his wife died in a car crash. Now he inhabits an isolated farm with two kids and a brother (Joaquin Phoenix), a baseball player who failed to make the big league.

Two adult stars playing embittered men, with expressions of permanent worry or apprehension, weigh down the film's spirits right from the start - even before the inexplicable crop circles in

the Gibson acres indicate spirits of a more malign kind in the vicinity.

Gibson's dog goes off its food, then off its head; his kids go silent (a mercy, since their babble is so poorly articulated, or recorded, that you cannot understand most of what they say anyhow). Mel runs circles of his own round the house bawling at the top of his lungs to scare off what's out there.

Apocalypse comes not only "now", but far too soon - before any persuasive build-up of tangible concern. Almost at once, the world's end is declared nigh with reports of UFOs around the globe and local sightings of un-jolly green giants running amok among the corn stalks - but, oddly enough, no message from the Oval Office to rally the republic against what President Bush would probably call "these extra-territorialist folks".

The aliens, seen in teasing bits and pieces, a green leg vanishing into the corn field, a scrawny arm with crab-like claws, are themselves unbelievably corny when revealed in their full onepiece jump-suits: they wouldn't qualify as a scare-ride attraction in an amusement park. But Mel's soon intoning, as every editorial writer did on the morning after 11 September, that "everything's going to change" in the world.

Little does, in fact, except that his kids put on pointy party hats of silver foil and start reading story books for additional advice on how to repel aliens intent on coming to dinner - or making a dinner out of them.

For a director of Shyamalan's hitherto well-strung sensibilities, it's a silly story slackly told. In The Birds, Hitchcock mounted a doomsday scenario that left the air thick with omens in a formerly calm and conventional community. But here there's next to no convincing overture. The world emergency happens overnight in an already disturbed household, though only glimpsed on TV, broadcasting stations being apparently off limits to outer-space intruders.

The invaders' retreat from the Gibson home is anti-climactic following an all-American assault on them by Joaquin Phoenix, who calls his retired baseball bat back into service. The single nasty entity we see chez Mel has a comic-strip claw, but also an Achilles heel that proves immediately vulnerable to corrosion from the commonest kitchen product. The upshot is less apocalyptic than emetic.