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Review by Susan Granger
1½ stars out of 4
There's a problem casting Kim Basinger. Since winning an
Oscar for "L.A. Confidential," she's attempted two protagonist roles -
"I Dreamed of Africa" and this - and neither has worked. Kim's pretty
but emotionally passive. Which just isn't appropriate for this
supernatural thriller in which a psychiatric nurse, a lapsed Catholic,
discovers that her strung-out junkie sister's child, Cody (Holliston
Coleman), whom she's cared for since birth, is "special". Not only can
the six year-old cause objects to spin and the snow inside a
paperweight form a cyclone, she revives a 'dead' bird in the school
yard. And that's just the beginning of the girl's spiritual power, at
least according to runaway informant Christina Ricci and censured
Jesuit Ian Holm, who reveal that Cody's birth coincided with the
reappearance of the Star of Bethlehem after two millennia - and the
devil is after her soul. His missionary is creepy looking Rufus
Sewell, whose unfocused eyes are as disconcerting as a leering
gargoyle. Predictably, Cody is abducted by his black-clad Satanists
and threatened continuously to renounce God for the forces of darkness
before Black Easter. "She will be ours!" vows Sewell. Only Jimmy
Smits, as a former seminarian-turned-FBI agent specializing in the
occult, is willing to help Basinger. (For this, Smits quit "NYPD
Blue"?) Reminiscent of "Stigmata," "The Exorcist," "The Omen" and "The
Sixth Sense," the stilted screenplay, credited to three writers,
strips novelist Cathy Cash Spellman's plot down to its sinister
mystery-child essentials. Chuck Russell's direction is lackluster and
the special-effects are limited to computer-generated rats and
demons. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Bless the Child" is an
ominous, apocalyptic 4. Good vs. Evil? You guess who wins.
Copyright © 2000 Susan Granger
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out of 4
