Godsend

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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

The umpteenth recycled shocker about a mystical dark child with an aura of disaster.

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.

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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

It's a thriller, a bad thriller, completely lacking in psychological or emotional truth.

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.

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.

Variety Joe Leydon

Solid performances, handsome production values and a few genuinely creepy scenes are not enough to save Godsend.

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.

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.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Godsend is godawful.

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.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

As the film's boo! moments get spookier and more frequent, Godsend gets more and more inane.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

In Godsend, we have the spectacle of three good actors tied to the mast of a sinking premise.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Every scare is telegraphed. Every surprise is recycled from a better thriller. Even the devil would send this one back.

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.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

How could such a high-octane cast produce such low-octane horror?

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.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Neither very scary nor very interesting, Godsend is an unresurrectable muddle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Not just a bad thriller but also a thing of pain.