12 Most Hated Blockbuster Movie Endings

10. Signs

The Dark Knight Rises Ending
Touchstone Pictures

The Wachowskis weren't the only directors to spectacularly fall from grace in the early 2000s. M Night Shyamalan also hit the big time in 1999 with The Sixth Sense, leading some to proclaim him the new Spielberg.

However, whilst 2000's Unbreakable was mostly considered an admirable follow-up, Shyamalan soon found himself in a downward spiral which, for a time, it looked like he would never get out of - and it all started with 2002 alien invasion drama Signs.

The writer-director's signature blend of far-out genre material and grounded emotional realism was already getting stale, to say nothing of his over-reliance on twist endings. Fair play to Shyamalan, then, for stepping away from the big shock climactic twist device this time. Unfortunately, the ending he settled on was just a bit daft.

In a War of the Worlds-esque move, it transpires that the aliens are deathly allergic to something Earth has in abundance: water. And so, Mel Gibson's lapsed priest and his younger brother Joaquin Phoenix are able to overpower their extra-terrestrial home invaders with a baseball bat and the many glasses of water Gibson's young daughter has left around the house.

Not only does this method of defeating the aliens feel a bit too easy after all the ominous preamble, it also proves a bit of a stretch that the film implies some divine foreknowledge on the part of Gibson's late wife, whose dying words appear to foretell all they need to do to survive.

Contributor
Contributor

Ben Bussey hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.