Review: "Godsend" (2004)
WARNING: This review contains SPOILERS, you have been warned.
It's amusingly appropriate for Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn Stamos to be playing a married couple, being that they share the distinction of being fine dramatic actors who emerged from backgrounds usually known to produce the opposite: Kinnear was a jokey cable TV host, Stamos a supermodel.
I bring this up to illustrate a point: "Godsend" is such a bore that one actually has time to ruminate on things like that.
The trailers have already told you the plot, and if you missed those you'll no-doubt hear about it on the dozen-or-so "tie-in" news stories about the "controversial" issues the film raises (or, to be more precise, exploits for cheap stabs at being of-the-moment.) But, for completeness' sake: Our leads have an 8 year-old son who buys it in a freak car accident. They are approached by your basic mad scientist Richard Wells (Robert DeNiro) who tells them he can clone their son (named, of course, Adam) from a single stem cell (oooh! oh-so-topical science lingo!) in a procedure that is foolproof but "very illegal." All goes well until Adam 2 (who, of course, is unaware of his origins) passes the age at which Adam 1 died and starts having the usual visions and behavior problems displayed by progeny of "The Omen," "Bad Seed" and "Sixth Sense."
I'm spoiling NOTHING, I'm confident, by pointing out that DeNiro's Dr. Wells eventually sports a sinister agenda, dangerous ego and a loose grasp of sanity. You knew that already because the film is a prey-on-suburban-fears non-thriller about cloning, and thus it presumes that the majority of audiences that are going to like it already "know" that cloning is an automatic-evil because, for lack of a cleaner term, "the preacher said so."
And that's the problem. The film isn't really "about" CLONING any more than "Stepford Wives" was really "about" psychological reprogramming. All the talk of cloning and stem cell research is just so much spackle and fresh tile on the same tired old "morality" play thats been repeated ad-nauseum since the first idiot missed the point of "Frankenstein:" An eeeeevil scientist "tampers in God's domain" (read: makes actual progress) and unleashes "the forces of evil" by doing so.
The problem with stories like this is that exploring the implications of new science, even with a negative ideological slant, in an intelligent way would require more brainpower than the average likely veiwer for the genre is willing to expend on their film watching. So the stories innevitably have to cheat and assign some extra bit of evil on behalf of the mad scientist in order to explain away all the things going bump in the night.
I won't spoil the "big twist" here, primarily because I'm still not sure exactly what the POINT of it is supposed to be. However, I will say that no prizes are to be awarded for guessing that the third act involves: A "race against time" to unravel a mystery, a female character stalked in dark and unfamiliar surroundings, a meant-to-be-taken-as-evil-at-face-value rant by a scientist and, yes, a "sage-like" black woman (the only person of color with a speaking role in the film, of course) who offers up "the final peice of the puzzle" while surrounded by religious imagery talking about seeing "nothin' but eeeeeevil behind them eyes!" Anyone who is the least bit surprised to hear ANY of that is respectfully asked to please see more films.
Again, without spoiling the "surprise," allow me to say one thing about the film's finale: In the history of moronic movie endings, this one stands unique. It's common for thrillers like this to be filmmed with more than one possible finale, but "Godsend" offers up a series of "gotchas" which seem to have been sampled from a collection of entirely-unrelated multiple endings. If you can find the point in all of this, other than a desperate stab for one more "look behind you!!!!!!" from the easily-pleased in the audience, let me know, won't you?
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