A Review by Phil Calabro
2004, Lions Gate Films, Dir. Nick Hamm, Starring Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Cameron Bright, Robert DeNiro, Merwin Mondesir
Wow. Just wow. I didn't think any director in his god-forsaken mind would so blantantly rip off the premises of Rosemary's Baby and The Omen, and assume that a star-laden cast will drag this dead corpse across its time. This one is an utter floater, folks. It's not scary, not interesting, and in some points, really really annoying. God did anything but send this piece of trash - apparently Satan was an executive producer.
Our plot involves the oh-so-happy city family the Duncans, which is composed of Paul (Kinnear), Jessie (Stamos), and young Adam (Bright). On the day after his eighth birthday, Adam gets hit by a sedan and dies. However the help of the ever-so-mysterious Dr. Wells, Adam is cloned and reborn again. But when eight years pass, and strange things start happening, the parents are wondering what to do. My solution would be to end the movie, but obviously things don't end off too happily.
The casting doesn't help this - it's not glorious or terrible, it's just sub-par. The only worthwhile cast member would be DeNiro, who plays off a creepy and mysterious geneticist who helps clone Adam into his idea of an ideal son. Kinnear and Stamos pull off boring roles, showing no apparent skill at their jobs. One of the worst parts of this entire movie lies in the hands of one of the cast members, and that is Cameron Bright, who plays Adam. This kid has got to be one of the most annoying young actors I have EVER seen. His "cuteness" and innocence, if you want to call it that, is played off so deliberately, it's practically impossible not to hate him. Instead of embracing him as a character, it makes me want to hit him in the face with a basketball.
The suspense? There's none of that at all. It's so easily predictable, it's as if the director was slapping us in the face with the ending, ruining the entire movie for us. It's not well-crafted, not original, it's just really really boring. The "scary scenes" are just cut-and-paste from thrillers and horrors of the genre today, so it makes you angry when you come out of the theater, assuming you would've gotten something new to watch. And then when it tries to be psychological a la Kubrick's Shining, it falls flat on its ass, assuming it was doing something good.
You want a bad rehash of The Sixth Sense and The Omen? Then Godsend is still not the film for you. It's possibly one of the worst films I've seen in a long long time. And I hope that all the cast members, excluding Bright get their butts in gear to get into some decent film jobs. Oy. I can't even write anymore.
0.5/4 stars
