Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
76
(500) Days of Summer
49
2012
60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
70
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
52
Blind Side
47
Box, The
61
Capitalism: A Love Story
55
Christmas Carol, A
43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
23
Couples Retreat
39
Fame
30
Final Destination, The
34
Fourth Kind, The
41
G-Force
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
28
Pandorum
58
Pirate Radio
39
Planet 51
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
46
Twilight Saga: New Moon, The
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
58
(Untitled)
96
35 Shots of Rum
56
Adam
39
Adventures of Power
66
Afterschool
73
Amreeka
49
Antichrist
76
Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86
Beaches of Agnes, The
71
Big Fan
65
Black Dynamite
76
Bliss
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
44
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
Bright Star
76
Broken Embraces
70
Bronson
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
60
Collapse
82
Cove, The
75
Crude
82
Damned United, The
53
Dare
50
Defamation
67
Departures
70
Earth Days
85
Education, An
55
Endgame
88
Fantastic Mr. Fox
31
Fix
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
xx
From Mexico with Love
28
Gentlemen Broncos
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo
63
Horse Boy, The
74
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
26
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
43
Little Traitor, The
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
46
Love Hurts
84
Maid, The
45
Mammoth
75
Messenger, The
55
Missing Person, The
59
More Than a Game
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
48
New York, I Love You
66
No Impact Man
26
Oh My God
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
79
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
73
Red Cliff
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
65
Skin
41
Splinterheads
42
Staten Island
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
58
Storm
82
Sun, The
49
Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
73
That Evening Sun
61
Trucker
49
Turning Green
83
U2 3D
45
Uncertainty
67
Visual Acoustics
32
War on Kids
67
Way We Get By, The
65
Wedding Song, The
xx
White on Rice
59
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
74
Woman in Berlin, A
43
Women in Trouble
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Godsend
EMAILPRINTLions Gate Films Inc.
Generally unfavorable reviews
Based on 32 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 27 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Fantasy | Horror | Suspense/Thriller
Written by: Mark Bomback
Directed by: Nick Hamm
Release Date:
Theatrical: April 30, 2004
DVD: August 17, 2004
Running Time: 102 minutes, Color
Origin: USA / Canada
Summary
RATING: PG-13 for violence including frightening images, a scene of sexuality and some thematic material
Starring Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Robert De Niro, Cameron Bright, Merwin Mondesir, Sava Drayton, Jake Simons, and Elle Downs
Paul and Jessie Duncan (Kinnear, Romijn-Stamos) have lost their beloved eight year-old son Adam (Bright) in a tragic accident. As they are arranging for his burial, Dr. Richard Wells (De Niro) approaches with the incredible offer to clone, and bring back their boy. (Lions Gate Films)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: The Very Thought of You
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder
Downright scary in some places, Godsend might be more potent if it wasn't watered down by religious trope predictability.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
The umpteenth recycled shocker about a mystical dark child with an aura of disaster.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Unravels in a series of spooky dream sequences, dopey detective work, and a couple of richly hambone-ian De Niro soliloquies.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
The best that can be said about the film is that its naturalistic look and dark hues are occasionally intriguing, and its twist is fairly unpredictable, if far-fetched.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
It's a thriller, a bad thriller, completely lacking in psychological or emotional truth.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach
Godsend is two-thirds of a good movie, with a final third that's just downright awful. So much wasted potential only makes the whole thing that much more painful.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
To its credit, the film has an engagingly bleak and minimalist look, and a brisk pace. But the chills are few. Every step seems contrived, predictable or unintentionally funny.
Read Full Review >Variety Joe Leydon
Solid performances, handsome production values and a few genuinely creepy scenes are not enough to save Godsend.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
When is a horror movie not a horror movie? When it’s a strained, by-the-numbers production that limps to an unlikely conclusion like Godsend.
Read Full Review >Premiere Aaron Hillis
With its cheap scares, its defiant lack of special effects, and the most blatant usage of a red coat as a stand-out prop since Schindler’s List, Godsend is as much an experiment-gone-wrong as its Frankensteinesque plot.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
De Niro wears a shamefaced look most of the time, as if doubly embarrassed: He agreed to a movie he knew was worthless, yet he's too lazy or indifferent to give us his best.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan
As the film's boo! moments get spookier and more frequent, Godsend gets more and more inane.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis
A consistently underused and often underrated actor, Kinnear gives one of those sympathetic performances that prevent you from believing the worst about a movie despite the sounding alarms.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden
This thin concoction of domestic drama and thriller suspense won't hold up after the curiosity factor runs its brief course. Neither Robert De Niro nor a phalanx of a dozen producers can deliver Godsend from unintentional comedy.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Despite its provocative premise, this throwback to deliberately paced, low-tech chillers of the pre-CGI era is a dreary slog through haunted-child movie cliches -- portentous dreams, glassy-eyed stares, cryptic pronouncements.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos appear to be vying for the title of filmdom's least-convincing married couple, while Robert De Niro, as the movie's modern-day Dr. Frankenstein, takes his own expert career slumming to a new depth -- he's become an evil clone of a once-great actor.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
As in most bad thrillers, the number of pointless shocks increases in direct proportion to the drama's decreasing vitality, like defibrilator paddles jolting a dying man.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
The picture, which fails to achieve its ambitions or to fulfill our expectations, is ultimately worse than a violent piece of hack work, in which the director isn't interested in displaying his integrity -- or taste. You'd be better off downloading the trailer: a much more convincing piece of storytelling.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
There's no excuse for a thriller as lame, leaden and unthrilling as Godsend, which manages to take a potentially interesting subject - human cloning - and use it to put audiences to sleep.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
In Godsend, we have the spectacle of three good actors tied to the mast of a sinking premise.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Every scare is telegraphed. Every surprise is recycled from a better thriller. Even the devil would send this one back.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
At the half-hour mark, Godsend falls off the edge of reason, veering wildly away from what seems the promising beginning of a drama about the ethics of human cloning and instead becomes the cheesiest of hallucinatory horror movies.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
How could such a high-octane cast produce such low-octane horror?
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
An unsatisfying, overly restrained bore, capped off by an ending so strange and inconclusive, it feels like something you'd find on the ''deleted scenes'' portion of a DVD.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
Neither very scary nor very interesting, Godsend is an unresurrectable muddle.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Mark Holcomb
The pivotal plot twist isn't hard to predict, and Brit theater vet Hamm and screenwriter Mark Bomback rely on jolts that date back to the silent era.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
It mostly serves as a warning to stay away from future films involving director Nick Hamm and screenwriter Mark Bomback.
Read Full Review >Empire Mark Dinning
Godsend is based on an intriguing premise. Sadly, it's mangled into an Omen-lite disaster area, thanks to a script torn between making a moral point about cloning and cheap shocks.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Godsend makes swill of religion, science, family, and morality. It has the sensitivity of a cactus, the ingenuity of a square wheel, and the integrity of a CEO.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
Turns into a pea-brained hodgepodge of "The Omen" (1976), "The Sixth Sense" (1999), and about 30 Grade-Z Bela Lugosi mad-scientist movies.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 4.0 (out of 10) based on 27 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Felix Q. gave it a7:
For the most part, not terrible. It's a fair, if not wholely unique concept, and terrifically cast. It's not as bad as it's painted, it's really quite passable- a mid level thriller with the creepiest (I mean that in a good way!) child actor ever. I would've given it an 8, but really I expected more from the ending. As I said, the concept itself is intriguing if slightly over-used, but a great ending would've pulled this whole thing up.
Deluge gave it a3:
Godsend is a terrible thriller. It's not worth watching in theaters, not worth renting it on DVD not even worth watching it on channel 45 if it airs on tv.
D gave it a1:
Saddly dissapointing ending.
Mark B. gave it a1:
Since Robert De Niro played the Frankenstein monster in Kenneth Branagh's take on Mary Shelley's horror saga, perhaps he wanted to get on the other side of the operating table and take a shot at playing the not-so-good doctor. That, or maybe the reason he signed on for this predictable, offensive bore is that he's pretty much taking ANY script that floats his way these days. (At least Sir Laurence Olivier had grandchildren he wanted to leave as much money as he could to after his death; what's your excuse, Bob?) Distraught couple Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Rojmin-Stamos, having lost their third-grade son in a cruel accident, take De Niro's offer to clone him; needless to say, the results are more predictable than expected. The fact that Kinnear and Rojmin-Stamos are so convincing at portraying genuine parental anguish and grief in the early parts of the film (even if their performances become torpid and routine once the operation is performed) is a key to precisely what makes this film so obnoxious; I'm not saying that some subjects aren't suitable for filmmaking, even in the horror genre (can you imagine what the brilliant David Cronenberg could've done with this material 25 years ago?), but the greatest tragedy that a parent can face deserves much, much more respectful handling than a lazy hack job full of fraudulent ankle grabs, "shock" musical stings and eleventh-hour twists that are surprises to all but millions of reasonably intelligent viewers. Getting back to De Niro and his participation in this, something (anything!) has gotta be done to restore the man's pride in his selection of roles and films, and I think I've got a good kill-two-birds-with-one-stone idea. Arrange with the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences that if Martin Scorsese will put Bobby in a movie that turns out half as good as Goodfellas or Raging Bull (hell, let's settle for half as good as Casino or Cape Fear) then Marty gets his long-awaited Best Director Oscar no matter who the competition is. Deal? Okay? Please?
Michael V gave it a0:
Oh come on! You can tell a movie sucls when it has lines like "Oh i have to do the dishes, do the the laundry...oh and i have to do you!" and a sex scene insues. Give me a break!
sasha t gave it a5:
Ok...well robert deniro was always great ! what happened to him? his last movies are horrible, including godsend that was a stupid movie, meet the fockers (not as good as meet the parents) and his last movie (wich i saw 2day) come out ,come out whoever you are (was even scaryer then godsend).
Tyler C gave it a7:
To the people in the theatres, I can understand why it would get such a low score. If you get the DVD. You can see the 4 extra alternate endings which makes up a lot for the movie. The alternate endings tell us that a lot went into this movie and it also had Robert DeNiro!!
