Godsend

In Godsend, Frank finds a run-of-the-mill child-cloning thriller turned into a flaccid frightfest that is all clumsy thumbs, and no controllable finger to decisively point this devilish dud of a movie in the right creative direction.

Godsend (2004) Lions Gate Films 1 hour 42 minutes. Starring: Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Robert DeNiro, Cameron Bright. Directed by Nick Hamm.

One should try to routinely take their run-of-the-mill child-cloning/reincarnation psychological thrillers for what it’s worth. Unfortunately for filmmaker Nick Hamm, he just happened to conjure up a glaringly sluggish creepy kiddie supernatural flick that’s more laughably lopsided than it is lacerating in its haunting spirit.

In the choppy and overlong delusional drama Godsend, Hamm helms a flaccid frightfest that is all clumsy thumbs and has no controllable finger to decisively point this devilish dud in the right creative direction. Hampered by traces of unthinkable sketchy acting and screenwriter Mark Bomback’s underwhelming and spotty script, Godsend wreaks its hazy havoc in a mindless methodical manner.

Godsend is an utterly loopy and lethargic Sixth Sense wannabe that has no original idea as to how to weave its reductive grievous and gory sentiments into a solid and compelling scare session.

Godsend is an unimaginative and odd movie that twists and turns yet it doesn’t seem to know what to do with its withering themes of peril and despair concerning loss and artificial life. If anything, Hamm’s myopic narrative may entice unintentional comic relief from a questionable standpoint of recycled caustic clichés edged along by wooden characterizations and contrived circumstances that help render this chilling affair tremendously trivial. Not all the furious flourishes in the world can make this inconsolable hair-raising exorcise an acceptably polished and riveting suspense piece.

The premise centers around a New England-based couple named Paul and Jessie Duncan (Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), a pair of grieving parents that lost their 8-year old son Adam (Cameron Bright) to death following a freakish car crash. Understandably, Adam’s demise is still devastating and numbing to the Duncans as they continue to wallow in their apparent pain and inner suffering.

If there was just one chance that Paul and Jessie could experience the joy and love of Adam’s company once more, it would take away all the tension and turmoil that currently suffocates their fragile mindset.

The realization of reuniting with Adam suddenly seems like a terrific prospect when Jessie’s former professor Richard Wells (Robert DeNiro) enters the picture with a shaky promise of bringing back the Duncans’ dearly departed offspring. Dr. Wells is now a clinical specialist in the science of human cloning and presents to the Duncans an offer they won’t refuse—bringing back their precious Adam to life via the DNA samplings that will jump start the boy’s existence all over again.

Granted it’s a gamble on Dr. Wells’s part but Jessie doesn’t care about that uncertain reality as long as the results are favorable in having Adam return to her lonely arms. Paul, on the other hand, is quite weary about this procedure and the skepticism is evident but he sees how rejuvenating this experiment will be for Jessie’s damaged psyche.

Anyway, with the assistance of Dr. Wells and his cloning capabilities, Jessie finally gives birth to baby Adam number two who’s obviously the spitting image of their original late son. As the years go by, all is pretty much comfortable and cozy until the cloned Adam II starts to show some bizarre behavioral signs in his eighth year of existence.

Strangely enough, the patterns of Adam II’s raucous reactions are occurring at the specific age of eight when the Duncans’ first Adam had died tragically. In other words, the second installment of Adam Duncan is uniquely defective and this second helping of a lost loving son will soon make bewildered parents Paul and Jessie pay dearly for messing around with the natural order of things meant to be.

Consequently, Godsend is a pseudo-stylish and brooding "fingernails-scrapping-the-chalkboard" flick that falsely champions itself as a dark and disturbing fantasy forewarning the concept of manipulating manufactured life and the consequences about tinkering with scientific fate. This is all well and good about the message of this misguided movie but Hamm fails terribly at delivering this belabored point in a meandering and gauzy fashion.

Because Godsend is so unbelievably shoddy and anemic, Hamm loses sight of any stimulating possibilities that could have enhanced this quasi-thriller as mildly riveting in its subject matter. The moviemaker is so determined to paint his petrifying picture as this somber display of disillusionment that he neglects to inject anything exciting or interesting that would give dimension to this undemanding patchwork of pathos.

The lead players Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos do what they can to heighten the mundane material but with mixed results. Kinnear is certainly effective as the disoriented dad and his feelings of unstable and emotional imbalance registers convincingly despite his notable efforts being wasted away in a schlocky chiller.

As a screen couple, both Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos somehow don’t seem to measure up as their chemistry as put-upon parents with abandonment issues feels like a stretch. Individually, they occasionally click when confronting the remorsefulness of their isolated struggles. Shockingly, DeNiro is uncharacteristically unfocused and simply goes through the staid motions without seeming to care how he traipses through the unpalatable proceedings.

At times, DeNiro’s Dr. Wells feebly is an arbitrary fixture in the middle of the madness and it certainly doesn’t help matters any that the resilient actor looks and acts bored with his pared-down alter ego. Bright is passable as the tortured tyke Adam but it’s nothing memorable that sticks out immediately amongst the "kid-in-endangerment" formula that rears its predictable head in this kind of repetitive sensationalistic cinema.

In the scheme of things, Godsend is a murky melodrama of crushingly halfhearted proportions. From the get go, this crawly clunker never managed to find its rollicking rhythm and that’s a darn shame because this showcase had some mighty good potential if it knew how to handle its content with an ounce of competence attached to its tiresome execution.

Frank Ochieng

(c) Frank Ochieng 2004

---

	FREE SF MAGAZINE Sign up for the Crowsnest SF e-magazine - full of funny reports and gossip. Be the first to find out about hot science fiction happenings & news!
more on the magazine... CHAT ABOUT THIS STORY NEWS ARCHIVE

OTHER CONTENT - June 2004

NEW. Add this news to your own web site for free!

Neal Asher Interview Psychologically disturbed android killing machines. A Beast that harvests people to research its genetic dabbling across time by sending them back to the primordial ages. A mysterious Japanese man still living millennia after Hiroshima. A physicist that uses nanotechnology to merge with a spacecraft. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Neal Asher. (INTERVIEWS) Big Ben Ben Jeapes interviewed. The author speaks about penning cracking reads like 'His Majesty's Starship' , the differences between writing SF for the young adult market and the 'grown-up' sector, and the sadness of shutting the doors at his own publishing house, Big Engine. (INTERVIEWS) Just a Tad More If Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow & Thorn series is "the fantasy equivalent of War and Peace" (Locus magazine), then Tad must be Fantasy's Leo Tolstoy. The prolific Mr Williams is cornered for some vodka and a chat. (INTERVIEWS) Bruce on Bruce The father of cyberpunk - or at the very least the Uncle - Bruce Sterling, chats about his new technothriller, The Zenith Angle, with real-life security expert Bruce Schneier. (INTERVIEWS) Forty Whacks Scots SF author Ken Macleod visits sunny Spain for the second installment of 'Stitch and Split: Selves and Territories in Science Fiction', in Seville, sponsored by the Universidad Internacional de Andalucia. Take a walk with Ken down the Latin road to SFF. (COMMENT) Eight Days in Zagreb Our jetsetting Scots SF author Ken Macleod flies out to Croatia as a guest at the Sferakon convention. He finds the old world of Yugoslav science fiction intriguing, from the pulp cover translations of Western SF novels to state-sponsored SFF societies. (COMMENT) The Weird Tale of 'Pulgasari' Mark takes a look at the fantasy film Pulgasari; featuring a beast which was a North Korean giant monster who ate iron and grew to hundreds of feet high. It's director was kidnapped from South Korea, taken to North Korea, imprisoned for four years with no explanation, and then forced to make the only Marxist monster movie. (ARTICLES) Godsend In Godsend, Frank finds a run-of-the-mill child-cloning thriller turned into a flaccid frightfest that is all clumsy thumbs, and no controllable finger to decisively point this devilish dud of a movie in the right creative direction. (FILM REVIEWS) Shrek 2: Frank's Take In Shrek 2, we are gleefully reunited with the amiable pot-bellied giant and his colorful crew of supporters that include his new wife Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) and his old sidekick Donkey (Eddie Murphy). (FILM REVIEWS) Shrek 2: Mark's Take There is distinctly less magic and fun in Shrek 2 as the title ogre has problems becoming accepted by his in-laws. All the same cast is back with the same voices, but the tone of the film is darker and we don't learn a lot more about the characters that we liked in the first film. (FILM REVIEWS) Van Helsing: Mark's Take Not as bad as it might have been, but still no bargain. This is a fast-paced and overblown CGI-fest that leverages off of the old Universal monsters but does not actually want to use them. Writer-director Steven Sommers of the 'Mummy' films handles action scenes well, but is poor with directing acting or even giving us a very good story. This is a film of dubious thrills and no chills whatsoever. (FILM REVIEWS) Van Helsing: Frank's Take In this film, our Frank finds an exceedingly glossy but empty-headed thrill-seeking monsters mash mishap that boasts competent big-budgeted special effects but little else. (FILM REVIEWS) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Mark uncovers quite probably the best new science fiction film he has seen since Minority Report and well before. A device allows for the removal of painful memories by erasing them. The hitch is that the memories must be opened and partially relived as they are being erased. Charlie Kaufman's third script is demanding, but it is delightfully engaging, intelligent, and even profound. (FILM REVIEWS) Troy Despite the showcasing of buff bodies clashing with conviction in this historic sword and sandals fable, Troy is an elaborate action-adventure yearning to sweep the moviegoer off their feet but the uneven rhythms sullies its energized scope. (FILM REVIEWS) Offworld Report June 2004: Science Fiction and Fantasy Interviews with Peter Crowther, Steven Brust, John Jarrold, Neil Gaiman and the stars of Van Helsing; JG Ballard considers disaster movies, Stephen Baxter dishes the dirt on the writing secrets of SF, and Octavia Butler ponders the nature of power. (NEWS) Offworld Report June 2004: Weird Science The Pentagon's science fiction weapons program (railgun warships, anyone?), space tugs, a robot built out of DNA, NASA's wilder dreams, the fantasy folk seen in Scotland, and why we should be begging China for a decent space race. (NEWS)

CHAT ABOUT THIS STORY

Advertise Here (More ...)