Godsend

Remember when the words Robert De Niro over a film title used to mean quality was on the way? What is such a fine actor doing in this piece of derivative trash? De Niro plays a shifty doctor who claims to have perfected a method for cloning human beings, and he lures grieving parents (Greg Kinnear and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) into the process after their eight-year-old son is killed. When Clone Boy passes the age of eight, he starts dreaming someone else’s dreams, and Stamos starts crying a lot. Nick Hamm directs, and the ending is easy to predict, with the attempts at scares laughably detectable. De Niro looks lost as he tries to make hack writing look De Niro worthy, a task at which he fails miserably. Kinnear and Stamos are talented, and they will survive this crap. De Niro needs to put a call into Scorsese right now. While he’s at it, he needs to call Hamm and demand he lose his number from his Rolodex. If he does it with his Travis Bickle voice, I’m sure Hamm will never call back.