Godsend

All is not well in the Duncan household. Idealistic schoolteacher dad Paul (Kinnear) and photographer mom Jessie (Romijn-Stamos) are debating the wisdom of moving from their stylish downtown loft in favor of a more countrified approach, he’s just been mugged by a former student, and she’s trying to keep the lid on a madcap kiddie birthday party. The fete is for the couple’s 8-year-old son, Adam (Bright), who, in one of those reel world twists that we can all be thankful happen with much less frequency in the real world, is run over by a car and killed the very next day. Enter Dr. Richard Wells (De Niro), a former professor of Jessie’s, who approaches the shattered couple in the churchyard as they prepare to bury their only child and offers them the chance to clone their late offspring and begin family life anew. After several scenes of resistance from Paul, he falls into the trap of watching old home mpegs of the whole family unit and passes the phone to Jessie: Just do it, babe, and damn the clichés. It’s no surprise, then, when eight years pass and the new, unaware, and unimproved Adam passes his deathday and begins to broadcast on frequency Evil, eschewing snips and snails in favor of night terrors and (mostly offscreen) mayhem. Godsend has been sitting on the shelf for a while over at Lion’s Gate, and even after rumored extensive reshoots, it’s still way past its "spawn by" date. This is good news for aspiring screenwriters out there because it means the first great cloning horror film of the new millennium has yet to be produced, but bad news for the rest of us, who may be lured into one of the most tepid and tentative nonshockers in some time. Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos acquit themselves admirably – their couplehood is unforced and affecting – and young Bright, previously seen acting equally odd with Crayola products in The Butterly Effect, is creepy-sweet. De Niro, on the other hand, plays up the mad scientist bit so far that at one point he bashes a character’s head in with a sconce and then torches the church. (Altarior motives, indeed.) Screenwriter Mark Bomback’s script bears much of the blame. With its endless pontificating about the ethics and morals of human cloning – fertile ground for birthing a ripping good sci-fear yarn, to be sure – it never establishes a clear tone, leaving Hamm to fall back on jittery nightmare flashbacks of the sort that felt old when Audrey Rose was having them way back in ’77. Neither very scary nor very interesting, Godsend is an unresurrectable muddle, and one that Stephen King and Mary Lambert pulled off with much more aplomb (minus the sci-fi, of course) in Pet Sematary.