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#4.Signs(2002)
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The Cameo:

M. Night Shyamalan (playing a douchebag/himself)

The Lead Up:

Mel Gibson is an ex-Episcopal priest who stopped believing in God after M. Night's character killed his wife by being a drunken asshole.

Mel and his family discover a crop circle in their farm, they see an alien on their roof and chase it into a corn field where it disappears. It's around this time that they start to suspect something out of the ordinary might be going on. Unfortunately, it's not much longer before the audience starts to suspect the same.


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It starts innocently enough. M. Night drives by in a car. No big whup. M. Night had tiny parts in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. Sure it's egotistical, but Hitchcock did the background cameo thing, and Hitchcock has always given M. Night a boner. Time to get back to the business of story telling as the family has another close encounter and then ...

Wait a second, now M. Night is calling them at home. A voice cameo in addition to the visual? Wait, what is Gibson doing at M. Night's house? Oh, M. Night just happens to possess key plot development points (they don't make crop circles near water) while also inviting Gibson to go deal with the alien stuck in his basement. Why, that doesn't make sense at all.

Why it Nearly Ruined the Movie:

Up until this movie, fans of M. Night's work had two assumptions that always came to fruition:

1) The movies would have an engaging plot with a twist that would make your skull explode.

2) He'd have a short cameo that had little to do with the actual plot.

But this movie fell short on both accounts because:

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We're guessing the character he plays is supposed to be mysterious: is he a deeply remorseful man seeking redemption or a sadistic bastard that still wants to fuck around with Mel Gibson's mind? Of course this would have only been mysterious if the character wasn't such an unremitting asshole: he killed his wife and only apologizes to him when he needs someone to kill the alien in his basement? That's not spooky, that's just fucking wrong.
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Also, if you're going to create a character who's only reason for existing is to deliver a key piece of information and move the plot forward, it's probably best not to cast yourself. That tends to feel less like a cameo and more like you realized your plot wasn't going anywhere, and jumped in front of the camera and made up a bunch of shit that would get your movie to make sense again.

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