Godsend Review

Miami

Receive weekly updates, guest lists, and other perks.
Enter your email address:

home > arts&culture > Godsend Review

May 10, 2004 11:09 PM
by [email]

Grade: C+
Cast: Robert De Niro. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos.
Drama / Thriller.

Synopsis: A couple which has recently lost its 8-year old in a car accident decide to have him cloned.

Review: I was all over this film, and it was somewhat of a disappointment. The acting is good, but the story gets derailed about halfway through it, and then it works way too hard to deliver the payoff.

Greg Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos are Tom and Jean, a couple grappling with the loss of their only son. At the funeral, they are approached by De Niro, a stem cell specialist who makes them an illegal offer that they should refuse – to clone their son.

So, the unhappy couple moves to a remote location and forsakes all of their friends and loved ones, in order to hide what they’ve done from anyone who might have known their son.

We have to presume that everything is fine up until their new son’s 8th birthday, when he starts to act out of character. He seems like Adam, but he’s just not the same. Kind of like Pet Semetary. Remember? “Sometimes, dead… is better.”

The film takes a turn for the worse right around the midpoint. It does so in a possibly intentional, self-referential commentary, becoming itself a ‘clone’ of so many other thrillers – What Lies Beneath, the Shining, the Ring, and the aforementioned Pet Semetary.

What I’m still trying to figure out is why, in the last few years, movies of this genre have focused so intently on presenting the protagonists with a puzzle that must be solved – slowly revealing hints and clues about some past event to which the current participants have only a marginal link.

As I wrote earlier, this film tries way too hard. If the writers had stuck with the original premise – the cloning of a dead child, and what might happen to that child once he passed the age at which his original DNA was terminated – it would have been more plausible. But things get convoluted and unbelievable.