The set-up ... doesn't exactly have you performing cartwheels of excitement as it lays out its rather transparent tussle between good and evil.
Bless the Child (2000)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:95
Fresh:3
Rotten:92
Average Rating:3/10
Consensus: Bless the Child doesn't scare, but may provoke unintended laughter from audiences. It's basically a B-movie.
Runtime: 1 hr 47 mins
Genre: Horror/Suspense
Synopsis:
Omens and concepts of good vs. evil have no place in Maggie O’Connor’s (Kim Basinger) well-ordered, practical universe. Her life revolves around her job as a nurse at a busy New York hospital --...
Omens and concepts of good vs. evil have no place in Maggie O’Connor’s (Kim Basinger) well-ordered, practical universe. Her life revolves around her job as a nurse at a busy New York hospital -- that is, until her wayward kid sister, Jenna (Angela Bettis), shows up on her doorstep one rainy Christmas Eve and saddles Maggie with an autistic newborn child named Cody (Holliston Coleman).
Cody quickly touches Maggie’s heart and becomes the daughter she has always longed for. But six years later Jenna suddenly re-enters her life and, with her mysterious new husband, Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell), abducts Cody. Despite the fact that Maggie has no legal rights to Cody, FBI agent John Travis (Jimmy Smits), an expert in ritual homicide and occult-related crime, takes up her cause when he realizes that Cody shares the same birth date as several other recently missing children.
The little girl, it soon becomes clear, is more than simply "special." She manifests extraordinary powers that the forces of evil have waited centuries to control, and her abduction sparks a clash between the soldiers of good and evil that can only be resolved, in the end, by the strength of one small child and the love she inspires in those she touches.
Starring: Kim Basinger, Jimmy Smits, Rufus Sewell, Ian Holm
Starring: Kim Basinger, Jimmy Smits, Rufus Sewell, Ian Holm, Lumi Cavazos, Holliston Coleman, Christina Ricci, Angela Bettis, Dimitra Arliss
Director: Chuck Russell
Director: Chuck Russell
Screenwriter: Tom Rickman
Producer: Mace Neufeld
Composer: Christopher Young
Reviews for Bless the Child
Shamelessly silly, Bless The Child notches up the clichés as the daft story meanders towards a suitably hammy conclusion.
The use of child jeopardy as a cheap suspense mechanism is somewhat dubious, but one's unease is slightly mollified by the fact that much of this is far too silly to take seriously.
There are too many tricks and there's too little compelling plot here.
Must the makers of Bless the Child bang us over the head with symbolism?
Hackneyed script, shoddy direction, flat acting and laughable, cheesy special effects.
The deflatingly ordinary Bless the Child causes one to wish ... that movies about the supernatural could make contact with supernatural script doctors.
A frighteningly fundamentalist vision of contemporary society that's shamelessly and ineptly manipulative.
A better script or stronger direction might have helped, but without either, this one goes to the Devil.
Many special effects are obvious frauds: rubbery rats with unconvincingly red eyes, flying monkeys that make you nostalgic for The Wizard of Oz.
Horrendous dialogue and horrific directing dominate this thriller, in which Coleman's performance shines by default.
As satanic flicks go, Bless the Child is entertaining, but it doesn't add enough to the genre to make it truly blessed.
In times when special effects can show us anything, is it so much to ask to make several thousand crawling rats look at least realistic?
Latest News for Bless the Child
June 08, 2005:
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