Everything remotely interesting in this movie is overwhelmed by plot silliness and Basinger's terrible central performance.
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
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?
Isn't genuinely scary enough to suppress the inevitable urge to laugh at its cheesy inconsistencies, but isn't howlingly funny enough to raise it to the level of genius.
The film is actually pretty creepy despite its strident predictability, and I found myself jumping in places I didn't expect.
Just when you thought the summer couldn't get any dumber, along comes Bless the Child, acting like someone dropped it on its pointy little head.
A schlocky thriller that might appeal to less discriminating members of the mall crowd.
There’s an old saying: Bless the Child, spare the Audience. And you’d wished the producers thought about this before spending millions on this lame turkey.
Seems derivative of so many other movies that you're surprised that it doesn't have to credit its sources the way hip-hop artists do when they sample songs.
For a film about the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil, Bless the Child sure is bleak and moody.
The film short-changes its own dramatic build by employing cheap cutaways and less than seamless editing.
This hodgepodge couldn't have been salvaged by the most expert handling, but the execution here is pallid at best.
End of Days, cheesy as it was, comes nowhere near the glorious pandering and manipulation of Bless the Child.
It's all just cheap metaphor and stupid spectacle, with technology standing (rather inadequately) in for any sort of genuine inquiry into the fascinating mysteries and difficulties of actual faith.
Hackneyed script, shoddy direction, flat acting and laughable, cheesy special effects.
Bless the Child is pop junk, an airport paperback, literally, turned into a mid-budget devil thriller.
From an acting standpoint, you won't find more wood this side of a lumber yard.
This hopelessly cliched horror flick touches all the usual bases without much style or imagination.
The deflatingly ordinary Bless the Child causes one to wish ... that movies about the supernatural could make contact with supernatural script doctors.
Latest News for Bless the Child
June 08, 2005:
Chuck Russell Bites Into "Piranha" Remake
Our daily remake news, courtesy of Variety: Director Chuck Russell, along with Chiller Films, is planning to mount a remake of Joe Dante's "Piranha." Working from John... More...
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