Movie Review: GodSend
Godsend is a movie to touch our very souls. To rip headlines almost directly out of the newspaper and deliver them up to you in larger than life scenes, acted out by people paid to do so!
Well, by ripping headlines out of the newspaper I should probably qualify that to read: snipping out a back page story about cloning sheep and the concerns that may or not raise, buried as it is on page 12, just behind man caught in rabbit cage story and the police blotter. Or perhaps a lead story on FOX News on a day when a tsunami in China kills 7,000, India and Pakistan go to war by dropping nuclear bombs in the middle of a cricket match, and Chelsea Clinton enters the US Presidential race as Ralph Nader's running mate. With the leader "CLONING! SCIENTISTS IN MISSOURI CLONE DOG BY BREEDING TWO COCKER SPANIELS!"
And by larger than life I mean if you managed to see the film in the cinema. Because we caught Godsend on DVD, on which the characters were actually quite a bit smaller than life, unless you're very small, and if you are, you probably shouldn't be watching this film, anyway, as it's rated PG-13.
Okay, look, I'm not going to lie to you. This movie sucks. The acting is bad. Real bad. Now, this is considering that Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is one of the purported actors in the film, and a performance consisting of her just standing around looking at the camera occasionally and all the things going on around her would be considered an excellent performance. Oscar worthy, if only to get the chance to see more of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos standing around at the Oscars, looking at things. Or maybe a montage of her from her Sport Illustrated Swimsuit Issue days. It worked for X-Men. Well, not the Oscar part, but she was in this paint-on blue bodysuit, what more do you want out of a film?
If you are one of the people in the back row shouting, "A speaking part!" you should sit down, immediately, John Stamos.
Because she speaks in this one, oh how she does speak.
To be fair, Greg Kinnear and Robert De Niro also speak, and neither of them really make you feel good about this film. But enough of that, here's what happens:
Godsend opens with a happy family made up of the high school teacher Paul (Greg K), his lovely if somewhat stilted wife Jessie (Rebecca R-J) who does things with photography, and Adam Duncan, a seven year old, verging on eight, presumably doing the sorts of things seven year olds going on eight do, living it up in the city.
Happiness may not be being held up by former students and then allowed to go home by the grateful former pupil by most people, but for Paul, Jessie, and Adam, it's a great life. Oh sure, they're talking about moving out to the country, getting Adam out of the city, which is no place for a child to be, both Paul and Jessie agree.But, for now, they're wildly happy.
And you just know what's coming.
The little kid is going to get it.
Of course, you'd know that if you read the back of the DVD you'd just rented, as well. You'd have to figure it would come in somewhere along the line. And it does. Little Adam gets hit by a car on the mean streets of what looks like the Upper East Side. I'm not entirely sure what a teacher's son is doing up that far, but maybe teachers' salaries have gotten better in New York City in recent years. Or maybe those exhibits Jessie has are making the little family a lot of money.
The loss of this adorable child is supposed to tug at your heart strings, making you feel every once of pain Jessie and Paul feel up to and including the weird meeting between themselves and her former professor, one Richard Mills (Bobby D N) outside of the church where little Adam's funeral was held. Dr. Mills can help, he says. Which is, admittedly, an original thing to say at a funeral.
The thing is, even before the car hits him a couple minutes into the film I want the kid to eat it. He's smarmy, he's not funny, he's not cute, he makes my skin crawl. He gets a pretty ugly looking red varsity jacket type thing for his birthday and wears it to bed, thanking his Mommy and Daddy all the way with what's probably supposed to be a sincere grin on his face, but the actor sort of looks like he's not quite gotten over missing out on getting the lead (the wolf-dog part, that is) in a new remake of White Fang. An eight year old kid should never be that happy receiving something that you wear, unless it is a full-on suit of armour with real working sword for his birthday. He should be throwing a fit. Or making one of those, "Ohhhh, this is cool" kind of reactions, where he uses the word cool ironically. That reaction and use of the word cool in an ironic tone is one of the earliest known developmental stages of a kid, usually brought on by his or her first disappointing non-toy birthday present. It's been documented. But none of that for this fake kid.
The point at which I really lost it with the kid and started wishing really harmful stuff upon him (more than just appearing in this film, possibly forever blacklisting him in the process) was in one of the alternate endings on the DVD (see the disclaimer for buying info)... but wait, hold on a sec, this isn't the kids fault. You see a close up of a tombstone, with the inscription: Adam Neal Duncan. The kid's name is DNA backwards! Holy cow! How deep! How droll! J---- C----- stick a fork in me, I'm done.
And then, I paused.
Actually, this chronology is not entirely correct. It just helps for the sake of this review to tell things in this particular order. Just imagine it like little pieces of this review had died somewhere along the lines and were cloned, and resurrected later, resulting in a not entirely linear review of the film. Deep, huh?
So I paused. It's not the kids fault his character's name was Adam Neal Duncan. I seriously doubt the kid lobbied for that little name change. The Adam overtones throughout the whole thing were painful enough without throwing in that particular... err... bon mot shall we say. It was the writer's fault! The very guy who's supposed to be working on Die Hard 4.0!
That's the reason the dialogue sucked, the reason Richard Mills runs out to his car outside of a church which has just caught fire thanks to his escapades inside and slams his hands on the steering wheel a couple of times, curses Paul, and then drives off, with a poignant shot of smoke rising out the church's spire. The reason that, at times, you suspect the pain in Greg Kinnear's eyes is not for the loss of his son, or, later, the fact that his son is turning into a raving maniac, bent on killing someone, anyone, with an axe, but the pain he's suffering having to string some of the sentences he's given together.
That's even the reason some of Rebecca R-J's dialogue sucks. To be perfectly fair, she may be at fault in some spots, but for a large part it's the writer's fault.
Or maybe the director. Someone had a vision in this film, and they had some really crap dialogue and situations in there that were like those styrofoam blocks that sit underneath everything in a flower arrangement. They're light, porous, ugly, and no one's supposed to look at them, they're supposed to see the flowers instead. Only this flower arrangement has maybe a few wilting sticks of goldenrod and not much else covering the styrofoam.
NB. I'm not a professional florist, but I played one for what I suppose is my future sister-in-law's wedding, and thus learned probably not much about floristry, but other people near me did.
The upshot is, as I suppose you may have guessed, is that the writer or directory has the formerly happy couple up to Vermont, which is nice, and is where the Godsend Institute is, Dr. Mills' playground for cloning and other fun things with reproductive systems. And little Adam springs to life anew, same name, different place, different haircut. This haircut is a lot more bowl-like, in his second incarnation, which I'd be annoyed about, if I were a clone and came back with a worse hairdo than my previous time around. Which is probably why Jessie hides all the pictures she took of Adam v1.0 in a metal box in the basement darkroom she's got in the new house, so that little Adam doesn't see what they've done to his hair when it could have been so much better for his smarmy little self.
Around the age of eight, the same age he was when he died the first time (!) mysterious things begin happening to Adam! Which is a shocker to, well, no one, since they might as well have spelled it out in giant green letters on the blackboard in any one of the classroom scenes Adam is in or perhaps tattooed on his forehead when he was born for the second time. In fact, there very well might have been such clues, I just sort of lost interest in anything except thinking of insults for the writer who, of course, has managed to be employed by someone in Hollywood for writing, and I have not, thus far.
And that's it, really, the film in a nutshell. Quite possibly worse than Undercover, only without a young Kate Beckinsale's arm hair.
Just be sure and heed the film's ominous warning about cloning: If you move somewhere in Vermont where there's an abandoned cabin within walking distance, be sure you remove all sharp or bludgeonable instruments from the premises before letting your cloned child out of his or her cage, and don't cavort with old professors from college who now happen to work for fertility clinics.
disclaimer:
If, after all this, you still want to buy the horrible thing, you can grab it from here:
Now that we've moved most of our staff, including our head writer and his goons, over to the United States of America, West Coast, we find ourselves with days like Labor Day off. And we forget to tell you, the Reading Public, entirely.
This has been something we've been crap at since Day One at Sane Magazine in its many incarnations (mmm, carnations), so we don't see why it should come as a surprise to you that we failed to tell you we wouldn't be publishing promptly on Monday. But we are now, which is nice, in case you're one of those Monday morning quarterback types, and just like to have all your ducks in a row. Whatever that means, when you apply it to this particular situation.
Next week we'll probably be out on Monday, as we usually are, as I don't see any holiday, in any of our base nations (Ireland, England, France, Worcester, Mass., or a small island, hitherto undiscovered by civilisation, off of Austria's south coast) that will necessitate us giving our entire staff the Monday off, which would prevent us from publishing more fine content for more fine people, like youse.
Oh, unless you count the janitor's sister visiting as a national holiday, which we may.
We'll get back to you on that one, probably two weeks from now, well after we've decided what we're going to do, as far as publishing goes.
As usual, check your mail if you're a Sane Magazine subscriber (which you can become by filling out the contacts form and "opting in," as they say in the marketing department), and we'll tell you when it's out. Like we did this week, like we've done for a lot of weeks in a row now.
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