It reps another disappointing outing from Kim Basinger, who's clearly uninspired by the hack material.
Bless the Child (2000)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:26
Fresh:0
Rotten:26
Average Rating:2.5/10
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
Box Office: $0
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
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Reviews for Bless the Child
Horrendous dialogue and horrific directing dominate this thriller, in which Coleman's performance shines by default.
It makes the battle between good and evil look trite, familiar, and boring.
The unintentional effect of movies like Bless the Child is that they are enough to make agnostics out of true believers.
Must the makers of Bless the Child bang us over the head with symbolism?
Planning to lighten your wallet to gawk at this train wreck for a couple of hours? Here's a better idea: Shred up a few handfuls of fives and ones and use them to line the cage of your child's pet gerbil.
For my money, Bless the Child is a much funnier parody of a thriller than Scary Movie -- it just doesn't realize it.
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.
A schlocky thriller that might appeal to less discriminating members of the mall crowd.
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.
The film short-changes its own dramatic build by employing cheap cutaways and less than seamless editing.
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.
From an acting standpoint, you won't find more wood this side of a lumber yard.
The deflatingly ordinary Bless the Child causes one to wish ... that movies about the supernatural could make contact with supernatural script doctors.
After a slow start, it becomes enjoyably creepy, only to decline sharply into a morass of ever more inane ridiculousness.
Director Chuck Russell ... plays this like high drama, preventing all the potential camp humor and cheap thrills from bursting forth. And the film drags.
Chocked with every bad satanic cliche imaginable, Bless the Child is like Rosemary's Baby (1968) on steroids.
Latest News for Bless the Child
June 08, 2005:
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