Godsend

There can be no more compelling argument for outlawing stem cell research and human cloning than the prospect of more movies like Godsend. Who knew that such a complex ethical issue could be distilled down to this tired Bad Seed regurgitation?
Then again, if you so much as cross two pedigree strains of peas, your unnatural practises will open a veritable Pandora’s Box causing evil genes to fly out and viciously assault passers by. Or such is my understanding as gleamed from innumerable genetically themed movies, most of which, tellingly, went straight to video.
Alas, this one got through the net. And so you can look forward to the spectacle of Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as parents grieving the tragic loss of their eight-year-old son, Adam (Bright). But why bother with all that negativity, they surmise, when you can have an exact reproduction made to order? Thus, they end up accepting an offer from a strange doctor by Adam’s graveside to have their dead son cloned.
The fact that said physician wears a sinister trilby and is played by Robert De Niro doesn’t seem to perturb them in the slightest.
Inevitably, the spanking new Adam starts to go a bit wonky after his eighth birthday, what with the twisted visions, maniacal grin and his sudden keen interest in axes.
‘Are his genes remembering something?’ cries our Greg every five minutes, undoing all the street-cred won by last year’s Autofocus. Well, there is that. But there’s also some kind of mish-mash of demonic possession, murderous fugues and Jungian gunk, for Godsend is so busy sampling better movies that it never really gets all that precise about Adam’s affliction. Or perhaps it’s just that I stopped paying attention.
Anyways, this is one of those tedious spawn-of-Satan affairs, though it’s a lesser entry in the genre than say, Children Of The Corn V, let alone Rosemary’s Baby. You have burning bibles, echoing corridors, Amityville shaker-style abode, ludicrous dialogue (‘I was struck by the most awful premonition’, etc) and spooky woods.
And yet, like so many big-budget not-so-super supernatural affairs, Godsend is utterly devoid of edge, visceral bumps or even the necessary hysteria to elevate it to daft, baroque guilty-pleasure status.
To be fair, it’s only a teeny bit duller than something like What Lies Beneath, and while I suspect The Bad Seed’s malevolent moppet Patty Mc Cormack could knock him on his ass with a swish of her pigtails, Cameron Bright can narrow his eyes most menacingly. He could teach at least one of his co-stars a lesson or two.
Okay, so we all know De Niro has a hefty mortgage and an acrimonious, expensive divorce to cough up for, but signing up for such poor material can‘t excuse his faxed-in performance. ‘Beautiful country, isn’t it?’ he announces with all the conviction of someone reading from a particularly diffusive bus timetable, and as the tension (polite cough) mounts, he sounds increasingly like a bad De Niro impersonator abusing a tardy domestic.
Now, I’m not going to bang on about those Golden years when the annual Bob movie was an event (well, not before dark, at any rate), but surely he can find a more dignified way to pay the bills. I mean, don’t they have crack-whores in New York?