GODSEND

Part of a very good idea holds its own for a good long while in GODSEND, before both a prosaic plot turn and a strikingly unfortunate exposition sequence send the proceedings irretrievably downhill.

Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos star as Paul and Jessie Duncan, loving parents of eight-year-old Adam (Cameron Bright). When Adam is killed in an accident, Paul and Jessie are devastated. Before they grief-stricken couple can bury their child, they are approached by Dr. Richard Wells (Robert De Niro), once Jessie's college professor and now a famous geneticist. Wells swears he has secretly perfected a human cloning technique. Adam can be born to Paul and Jessie all over again. Paul has his doubts it is definitely illegal, possibly immoral and probably impossible, as well as requiring total secrecy and cutting all ties with old friends and family. However, the couple agrees, the procedure is a success and a healthy baby boy is born.

Flash forward eight years later. The Duncans are a happy family again until Adam hits the age at which he originally died. He starts to have devastating nightmares, walking and talking in his sleep. His behavior becomes erratic. Despite all of Wells' assurances that Adam is fine, Paul suspects something is very wrong.

Paul is right about this, of course, but precisely what is wrong is perhaps the least interesting and most outlandish explanation the filmmakers could have found. It's almost as though writer Mark Bomback wanted to do a horror story about cloning without saying anything definitively defamatory even in fantasy terms about the process. This is all the more unfortunate because Bomback and director Nick Hamm, along with Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos, depict people suffering unbearable loss so well that we want the follow-through to match the strong dramatic beginning. Hamm actually stages some terrific scares, one up there with, albeit somewhat derivative of, one of the better-known jumps in THE SHINING (both the Stanley Kubrick and Mick Garris editions). However, when Paul starts doing some sleuthing, he not only uncovers something farfetched, but he learns it in a scene so over-the-top and containing an ethnic stereotype so familiar that it lapses into self-parody. It's hard to imagine many films that could really recover from this, and GODSEND seems to lose its way once we're clear on why Adam intermittently goes through bad patches.

GODSEND isn't without its genre charms and viewers starved for a few good chills will get some nourishment here. Even so, the movie winds up more reminiscent of one of those 90-minute chillers done by ABC in the '70s than it does original contemporary horror.