Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on April 30, 2004, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Godsend begins with one of the more awkward attempts at character-establishing in recent cinematic memory. Heading home for his young son’s birthday party, Paul Duncan (Greg Kinnear) is accosted by a couple of muggers in a dark alley. Things are looking bad for our guy, until one of the thugs recognizes Paul as his former elementary-school teacher and (never apparently considering that Paul might recognize him) tells his cohort to let Paul go, leaving him with praise as “the best teacher I ever had.” Surely there was a less clumsy way, in a seriously intended movie, to establish Paul’s qualities as an instructor and spice up the opening reel with a bit of tension.
But then, a good deal of Godsend is about that heavy-handed, submerging potentially provocative genre material into a film that becomes increasingly obvious as it goes on. It’s a shame, too, because director Nick Hamm did a tense, stylish job on his previous psychothriller The Hole (and American audiences might actually see it one day, too, if Dimension ever lets the movie off its shelf), and both the setup and the twist of Mark Bomback’s script pack some potential. Not long after said birthday, little Adam Duncan (Cameron Bright) is killed in a car accident, and Paul and his wife Jessie (Rebecca Romijn-no-longer-Stamos) are plunged into despair. Along comes Dr. Richard Wells (Robert De Niro), head of the Godsend Project, who has been tinkering with cloning and offers the Duncans the chance to have Adam reborn, exactly as he was. (This involves the couple moving to a new area and completely severing ties with everyone they know, suggesting that collusion with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s memory-erasing Lacuna Inc. could be beneficial to the Godsend folks.)
In any case, the procedure is a glowing success for a full eight years, until Adam reaches the exact age at which he died. At that point, the boy begins experiencing nightmares, Hamm drags out the whole bag of over-familiar flash-cut/loud-noise tricks and the movie slowly begins to go down the tubes. Any ethical debate about cloning is left in the dust as the key questions become: Why is Adam acting increasingly weird and hostile? What might have been involved in his replication process that Dr. Wells isn’t telling the Duncans? Why would a woman who might know some of these secrets, and has been sitting on them for years, suddenly spill her guts to a total stranger? And shouldn’t a movie with this cast and serious subject matter be above a cheap shock cut of that woman suddenly appearing at a car window?
And one more question: Isn’t De Niro seriously overqualified for the stock mysterious medico role he plays here? That query seems to be answered by the actor himself, who walks through the part with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Perhaps he was trying for underplayed menace, but if so, that approach exists at odds with the increasingly overwrought material. Yet when De Niro does finally cut loose during a confrontational scene toward the end, going over the top with the acting might not have been the best-advised choice, considering that the thunderous argument about playing God takes place in (of course) a church complete with a burning cross.
Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos are nothing if not earnest, and do what they can to impart a seriousness to the proceedings, while Bright has just the right look for the haunted Adam and the chops to make him believable. Technically the film can’t be faulted, with up-and-coming composer Brian (Bubba Ho-Tep) Tyler contributing evocative music, though whoever was responsible for a key misspelling in an onscreen newspaper headline should get their hand slapped. The problem with Godsend is an apparent overall uncertainty whether to make a dramatic thriller about the ramifications of tampering with science, or a garden-variety exploitation piece about a child who comes to find unsavory uses for blunt and sharp objects. Nowhere is this more evident than in the final scene, which kind of, but not really, resolves the story in a way that’s kind of, but not really, scary.
