Bless the Child Review
by Chad Polenz (ChadPolenz AT aol DOT com)August 16th, 2000
Bless The Child
"Bless This Mess" is more like it.
Oh boy, when is Hollywood going to grow up and stop making these supernatural thrillers about Satan trying to take over the world using methods that can be stopped simply by bullets?
Here's the lowdown: this is another quasi-horror/quasi-action flick about seemingly innocent people who find out they may be, as the tagline reads; "mankind's last hope." This time it's Kim Basinger as Maggie O'Connor - a nurse living in New York City whose drug-addicted sister leaves her with her baby. Basinger raises the child as her own, a girl named Cody who is a bit different than other children. We even get such trite lines like "It's like she's listening to something we can't see." Oooh. There's a subplot going on about a series of child murders which are somehow related to New Age guru Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell) who is being hunted by FBI agent John Travis (Jimmy Smits) who happens to be a former seminary student and specializes in occult crimes.
It's really easy to see what is going on here and where the story will go. Will Maggie - a normal, average every-day woman be able to defeat a rich cult leader whose boss happens to be the devil? Will Travis finally be able to get enough dirt on Stark to make a conviction stick? Will Cody learn how to use her powers to spin plates and light candles by telekinsies to save the world?
The film isn't so much about the answer to that as it is the process. It attempts to play it safe by concentrating more on Maggie then bombarding us with a lot of cliche occult tomfoolery. Yeah, those symbols everyone has tattooed on their arms are pretty scary and yeah all that Catholic mysticism is fascinating because of all those stained-glass windows and Renaissance paintings and the dusty old books in the exiled Jesuit priest's sanctuary. And yeah the showdown at the end really had me believing Satan himself was going to win this time (the big cheese even makes a CGI cameo).
What it all comes down to is that there's not an original idea to the film. The screenplay is as trite and predictable and full of cliches as any horror flick released in 20 years. The special effects seem very half-assed and aren't all that impressive (dark grey is not a scary color). The villains have no motivation other than the fact that they're villains and therefore they are bad.
Just another movie released on an otherwise dead weekend and will be forgotten about in a few weeks.
GRADE: C
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