GODSEND is a turgid little mood piece that manages to miss every opportunity to actually engage, much less terrify its audience. No doubt that the ethical, theological, and philosophical questions engendered by the prospect of human cloning are the stuff of heated debate and interesting conundrums. GODSEND, however, eschews all of that in favor of derivative art direction and uninspired filmmaking. Pity.
The clone is Adam (Cameron Bright), a name that would be prescient if it werent so obvious. He was a bright little boy who was cut down the day after in eighth birthday outside a sneaker store. His grieving parents, idealistic inner city schoolteacher Paul (Greg Kinnear) and trendy art photographer Jessie (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) are approached on their way back from making the funeral arrangements by Dr. Wells (Robert DeNiro), an old professor of Jessies and currently involved in some illegal, but not, as he puts it, necessarily immoral experimentation in human cloning. He offers them the chance to have Adam back, but only if they pull up stakes from their hip urban loft and relocate to the remote hinterlands of New England were his institute, Godsend, operates. There is the requisite hemming and hawing by Paul and Jessie as they grapple with the ethics and then cave. Sure enough, the procedure is a success first try. Soon theres a new Adam living the good life in a century-old farmhouse that is House Beautiful perfect, Paul is teaching at an elite prep school, and Jessie is happily snapping photos that actually earn some money. Its too good to last, of course, and so it is that on the new Adams eighth birthday, he starts having odd nightmares, even when hes awake. In them, a dangerous kid named Zachary shows him disturbing images that werent part of the previous Adams life, and issues dire warnings about the future. During them, he starts staring at people with his big blue eyes, rousing himself only to spit at them or smile an odd, stretchy kind of smile.
If only it all worked. Director Nick Hamm fails to build up any sense of tension or dread. There is damped-down energy from the actors, the better to complement the consistently low lighting that might have been intended to create creepy shadows in which danger lurks, but doesnt. There is inept cross-cutting between scenes that dont dovetail together particularly well. There are great, yawning stretches where nothing much happens. There is, however, a great deal of information about cloning, narration by Dr. Wells during the in-office implanting of the clone egg, and by Paul to his high school biology class before he suddenly bolts from the classroom for no real reason. Its as though screenwriter Mark Bomback thinks that knowing how cloning works is enough to freak us all out about it. And there is a story line that attempts to throw in a twist that would force the flick into a 180 turn into interesting, but instead sputters out into a progressively silly, even incoherent, denouement.
Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos are earnest, if unremarkable. Bright has the properly odd pinched face and large glassy eyes that are de rigeur when it comes to spooky kids, and, speaking of spooky, DeNiro has that touch of Lucifer about him, making the decision to clone take on the air of a deal with the devil, but none of that, not even the pitch-perfect horror flick score that tells us when were supposed to be on the edge of our seats, can help.
GODSEND, though billed as a thriller, might better be thought of as a cure for insomnia. Unlike medications that might be used, I guarantee that GODSEND is not habit forming.
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