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50It's a thriller, a bad thriller, completely lacking in psychological or emotional truth.
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50Downright scary in some places, Godsend might be more potent if it wasn't watered down by religious trope predictability.
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50Unravels in a series of spooky dream sequences, dopey detective work, and a couple of richly hambone-ian De Niro soliloquies.
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50The 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.
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50Godsend 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.
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50The umpteenth recycled shocker about a mystical dark child with an aura of disaster.
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42To 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.
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40When 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.
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40Solid performances, handsome production values and a few genuinely creepy scenes are not enough to save Godsend.
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38Godsend is godawful.
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38With 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.
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38De 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.
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30This 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.
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30Despite 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.
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30Kinnear 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.
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30A 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.
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30The 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.
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30As the film's boo! moments get spookier and more frequent, Godsend gets more and more inane.
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30As 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.
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25Every scare is telegraphed. Every surprise is recycled from a better thriller. Even the devil would send this one back.
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25How could such a high-octane cast produce such low-octane horror?
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25An 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.
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25At 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.
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25There'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.
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25In Godsend, we have the spectacle of three good actors tied to the mast of a sinking premise.
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20Godsend 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.
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20Neither very scary nor very interesting, Godsend is an unresurrectable muddle.
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20It mostly serves as a warning to stay away from future films involving director Nick Hamm and screenwriter Mark Bomback.
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20The 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.
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12Godsend 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.
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10Turns into a pea-brained hodgepodge of "The Omen" (1976), "The Sixth Sense" (1999), and about 30 Grade-Z Bela Lugosi mad-scientist movies.
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10Not just a bad thriller but also a thing of pain.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 22
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Mixed: 6 out of 22
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Negative: 10 out of 22
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FelixQ.7
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Deluge3