OxfordPress.com

Grade: C

Verdict: God-awful is more like it.

"Godsend" is another bad Hollywood movie. That's hardly a surprise. But it is a shame, because it has a fascinating and timely premise -- the enormity of the ethical and scientific questions that would follow from cloning a human.

"Godsend" is also a big tease, because it features top-notch Greg Kinnear and superstar Robert De Niro, as well as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who takes what could have been another eye-candy role and turns it into a pretty convincing portrayal of a tormented mother. In fact, for the first 30 minutes, she and Kinnear get things off to such a promising start that it's all the more maddening when, during the next hour, the confusing and implausible script and ham-fisted directing sink this stinker.

The movie opens with Paul and Jessie Duncan (Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos) throwing a party in their downtown New York apartment for their son Adam (Cameron Bright, showing remarkable range) on his 8th birthday. The boy is precious to them, not only because he's smart and sensitive, but because he's their only child, since (as it's soon revealed) Jessie can never conceive again.

As fate would have it, the next day the happy little family is shattered when Adam is killed in a freak accident. But sooner than you can say tragedy and grief, snow is falling in a shadowy graveyard, and Richard Wells (De Niro), a pioneering fertility doctor, sidles up in the guise of a dark angel, offering hope beyond imagining -- or is it a Faustian bargain?

Some scientific jargon gets tossed around, and soon the Duncans have relocated to a small, isolated Vermont town, where Wells engages in research and a bit of secret surgery at his Godsend Institute. Using cells from Adam's body, he creates a clone of the boy, and then somehow implants it into the womb of Jessie, who nine months later gives birth to the new Adam.

Flash forward eight years. Life has been good, thanks to the many gifts bestowed by wicked "Uncle Richard." And Adam is once again the good son. That is until his 8th birthday, when he suddenly begins to experience ghastly night terrors and starts drawing wacky pictures.

Missing the chance to visit some of the most basic questions about the nature of existence -- for instance, would a clone finally prove or disprove that the mind, body and soul are distinct from one another? -- director Nick Hamm instead offers up a weak psychological thriller. After an endless string of scare-'em clichŽs, he struggles to find an ending and winds up with a whimper, not a bang.

Finally, the only thing we're really left wondering is whether De Niro will ever stop going through the motions in sub-par roles and get back to acting again.