Bless the Child

31 Days of Horror: Day 2

There are three important things you can take from the promotional poster for Bless the Child.  First and foremost, there is a "child" that "just turned six," so we have a horror movie with a child actor.  Not necessarily a bad sign, but worth noting.  Second, the word "bless" and the upside-down(-ish) crucifix of light imply that this is a story that will deal with Christian (probably Catholic) beliefs.  That means demons, the devil and/or possession; given the large number of crappy possession movies out there, that should set off a warning light.  Finally, the tagline "Mankind's last hope just turned six" tells us that the advertising team did not have anything cool in the script to draw from.  To put that in perspective, Leprechaun: In the Hood has the tagline "Evil's in the house."  I think it's safe to say that this is going to be a rough one to watch.

Bless the Child begins with Maggie (Kim Basinger) coming home after a long day of nurse work.  Waiting on her front stoop, though, is a bum. Maggie does her best to shoo the bum away, but it turns out that the bum is actually her sister, Jenna (Angela Bettis)!  Jenna has always been the black sheep of the family, and it's been years since the two have seen each other.  So, Jenna, how're you doing?

Yeesh.  Not so well, it seems.  The titular child that needs blessing happens to be Jenna's.  Jenna appears to be homeless and jobless, with a heroin habit and a brand-new baby from an unknown father.  On the other hand, it looks like she lost the baby weight ridiculously fast.  Well, that's heroin for you.  After some clumsy exposition where the two family members make sure to explain their motives and history out loud to each other, Jenna shouts "not it" (not really) and scrambles out into the streets, leaving Maggie to raise the infant on her own (really).  Fast-forward a few years and the infant is now Cody (Holliston Coleman), a six-year-old autistic child.  And if you've seen enough movies, then you know that "autistic" is interchangeable with "unique."  In Cody's case, she is able to do all sorts of cool stuff, like spin things with her mind and raise the dead.  Oddly enough, adults seem oblivious to these talents, probably because they're common symptoms of autism.  Maggie only appears to be impressed with Cody's ability to chase away her boyfriends.

"I know you look like Kim Basinger and all, but women who care about kids are a major turn-off.  Later."

Meanwhile, local police have been baffled by a number of child murders in the area.  An FBI occult expert, Agent Travis (Jimmy Smits), believes that the murders have been made in a ritualistic, Satan-worshiping kind of way.  But why?  And how are they getting all these six-year-old kids?

"Hey kid, do you want a nice, warm bowl of murder?"

That is when Jenna shows up again, cleaned up and with a rich husband in tow.  Her husband, Eric (Rufus Sewell), is the multimillionaire leader of a child outreach group/satanic cult, which doesn't sound like it should be a lucrative profession.

"Most of my money comes from pleasuring hobos"

Jenna and Eric want custody of Cody.  But Cody doesn't even know them, much less trust them or feel safe around them.  Eric gives Maggie an ultimatum --- if she fights them, he will crush her in court.  But if she considers giving them custody, they will steal away Cody when she's not looking.  They're tough negotiators.  Why do Jenna and Eric want Cody so badly, all of a sudden?  What's the deal with all the dead kids?  Is it important that Cody has the same birthday as them?  And why does Cody appear to have super-spinning powers?  Let's just say that someone born on that particular day, six years ago, might be a child of God.  Does that clear everything up?  No?  Tough.

Basinger, after the script hit her on the head with Christ parallels

The acting in Bless the Child should, for the most part, be varnished to keep it from harm while you try to destroy your copy of the movie.  Kim Basinger is bland, at best, in the lead role. It almost feels like she doesn't understand English, and she just memorized her lines phonetically; she would say "we're out of milk" with the same emphasis as "a naked man is wearing a horse carcass in my bathroom."  Maybe she thought her character was unfamiliar with the concept of human emotions, or maybe Basinger is a bad actress.  Rufus Sewell, who typically relishes villain roles, isn't much better.  His problem is that his character is supposed to be evil, and Sewell sleepwalks through the scenes where he is killing and drugging folks.  He puts most of his effort into the scenes where he tries (and fails) to out-argue a six-year-old.  As far as evil goes, that's some pretty minor league stuff, Mr. Movie Villain.  Jimmy Smits is actually okay, but I question the likelihood of a single FBI agent having the freedom to follow whatever cases he likes.  What is this, The X-Files?  Christina Ricci also makes a brief appearance as a former cult member.  She gives the best performance in the movie, and she isn't even that impressive.  She just spoke like a rational person.

"Seriously, it's not that hard.  What's wrong with the rest of you?"

Ian Holm has an even smaller part, and is gone after a handfull of lines.  As for the rest of the allegedly main cast, Angela Bettis is uniformly awful and alters her performance significantly in every scene she is in.  Little Holliston Coleman is fine as far as child actors go, but her role is more of an object than a character, so she doesn't make a great impact on the film, one way or the other.

Bless the Child was directed by Chuck Russell, who was presumably hired for his horror-directing experience.  I don't know what to say about his direction. Well, I don't know what nice things I can say about his direction.  Just because the man is a veteran in the genre doesn't mean he has the slightest clue as to how a supernatural horror movie should work.  The acting is all over the place, from incredibly bland to inappropriately manic, to hilariously melodramatic.  The action is handled poorly and unconvincingly; Russell apparently believes that severing heads doesn't get messy until the head falls off the body.

Look ma, no arterial spray!

The pacing is abysmal.  How long would it take for a complete stranger to convince you to kidnap a child from her wealthy and powerful rightful parents?  If you answered anything longer than "two minutes," then you are simply not qualified to direct Bless the Child.  Let me put it to you another way; in a movie about ritual worship and devil worshipers, the scariest thing is a ginger with an afro.

He sees the world with his dark eye and the nether realm with the pale one

There are two conventional ways for a supernatural horror movie to be frightening.  Either a supernatural being shows up and starts some shit, or humans acting on behalf of a creature do some extraordinarily reprehensible stuff, like eating human hearts or something like that.  Bless the Child opts for "C: None of the Above."  Sure, there is some dabbling in both of those key areas, but the otherworldly do little damage and the most reprehensible things in the script happen completely off-camera.  There are only three on-screen deaths before the climax of this movie.  One is a bum who is set on fire, another is a dude who gets knitting needles in his eyes, and the other is the victim of allergies (assuming she was allergic to blunt force trauma and knives).  None of these are mysterious, creepy, or show any direct connection to the supernatural stuff that is happening in the rest of the movie.  It doesn't fit the tone that the film is failing to set.

Bless the Child isn't just a bad movie, though. It is thoroughly and unintentionally ridiculous. Let's take the cult as an example. It is most popular with teens and twentysomethings, which makes sense, because most parents support their child's aspirations to someday drink the Kool-Aid. What I love to laugh at with the cult is that the kids --- the ones on the inner circle, anyway --- all dress in black, wear trench coats, and have bad haircuts. Because nothing says "join our cult" like surly teens dressed like Bauhaus fans. The logic of the cult members is hilarious, too. There's a fire in a church at the climax of the movie, and some serious shit goes down. Apparently, though, nobody left the burning building until the police showed up; some even stayed in the fire, apparently so they could jump out and get shot by cops.  Nothing tops the arguments between Eric and Cody, though.  Eric wants Cody to accept the Devil as her buddy because God doesn't exist (because one existing without the other makes total sense).  How does he plan to force this six-year-old to join his side?  Not by threatening to kill the only mother Cody has ever known.  Not by promising to reunite her with the biological mother that she has never seen.  Not even through something primal and ugly, like mutilation.  No, Eric tries to convince her through logic. And fails miserably.

This was in response to her saying "You first."  Honest.

Dude.  She's six.  If you can't change a six-year-old's mind, how the hell do you run a cult?  There are all sorts of idiotic moments in Bless the Child, and their silliness is the only thing that makes this movie bearable.

Oh, and you know how a real horror movie would have the bad guys try to kill Maggie?  They would probably chain her up, or feed her to a demon or something awesome. Not in this movie.  No, these jerks capture her, drug her, place her in a car and stage a car accident.  But they don't kill her and then fix the car to drive off a cliff, or anything reasonably simple like that.

Maggie, explaining the way they should have killed her

Instead, they set it up so that Maggie's car is speeding across a bridge during rush hour in the wrong lane; Maggie (who was drugged, but not killed) wakes up just in time to swerve out of traffic, and a nice stranger helps her not plummet to her death in the water below.  Think about that for a few moments.  Yes, it's kind of a waste for a complete random to be the one who saves Maggie, but that's not what irks me about this part.  These cult punks are complete morons (which might explain their involvement in a cult...).  First of all, Maggie is drugged, but they skimped on the knockout juice?  That's incompetent, but I suppose waste not, want not; if she had died, they could save the drugs they saved on their next Oscar-winning victim.  The choice in where to stage the crash was pretty odd, though.  Since she was unconscious, wouldn't the cult need to spend a good amount of time and effort getting her in place and the car rigged to make the plan work?  How does a downtown metropolitan area with a heavily-traveled bridge fit in to those requirements?  It seems to me like they would have had to stop traffic, set up the car, toss Maggie in, and aim it at oncoming traffic.  At that point, wouldn't it just be subtler to dismember her body on live television?

This is the proper reaction to that scene

I understand that a director can only do so much when the script he's working with can't even stimulate a mediocre tagline, but there's a lot of obviously stupid stuff in this movie.  Had the acting been better or if the mood was even a little tense or suspenseful, I would give the director a break.  Oh, well.  The only thing Chuck Russell did right was editing it into a comprehensible narrative.  Sadly, this movie is too slow-paced and the funny bits are too rare to make this film even approach the realm of so-bad-it's-good.  Instead, this is simply an awful movie made more noteworthy by the fact that this (and I Dreamed of Africa) was Kim Basinger's first post-Oscar work.  That puts Bless the Child into the same conversations where Halle Berry's Catwoman pops up, and that's never a good thing.

...and I'm only being this generous because the car crash scene almost made me spit out my beer.

The Tourist

When The Tourist was nominated for three Golden Globe awards, including acting nods for the two leads and a Best Picture nomination, it was reported that Angelina Jolie (and members of the press) had the initial reaction of laughing.  There was a mild hubbub about this, as well as the fact that the actors and movie were categorized in the "Comedy/Musical" section, when the movie was promoted as a romantic thriller.  All of these are good reasons to not watch The Tourist.  However, I'm a pretty big Johnny Depp fan, and I'm not adverse to a movie that wants to ogle Angelina Jolie.  How bad can it be?

Elise (Angelina Jolie) has been hanging out in Paris for a while, and she is being tracked by the French police and Interpol.  They are aware of her every move and everyone she interacts with; for her part, Elise is well aware of them, too.  One morning, as she goes about her normal routine, a courier delivers a letter to her.  The letter is from Alexander Pearce, her lover that she has not seen in over two years, as well as the reason she is being tailed all day, every day.  He tells her that he has a new face and that she should board a specific train to Italy, pick someone of his approximate height and weight, and talk to this stranger on the train.  The idea is that Interpol will assume that the random Alexander-esque fellow is Alexander, creating enough confusion for the real Alexander to swoop in and take Elise away with him.

There are several men on the train that fit the general description of Pearce, but Elise eventually chooses a shy math teacher on holiday, Frank, who is apparently unaware that he looks like Johnny Depp and has no reason to be shy or self-conscious.  The plan works beautifully, Elise wows Frank because she looks like Angelina Jolie and she's paying attention to him, and Interpol is certain that Frank is their man.  Until, that is, they check his ID and figure out he's Frank.  Criminals don't have Interpol's resources, though, and Pearce stole billions from a crook; these bad guys chase after Frank because they don't know any better, and Interpol doesn't interfere because they don't want to scare off Alexander Pearce.  Poor Frank is left bewildered and endangered by his chance encounter with Elise, and his only chance of survival comes from Elise, who feels bad for using him.  Or is it something more, I wonder...?

The basics of this story are a little old school, but they're not bad.  Mistaken identities are a classic source of both drama and comedy, but it's been a while since a major film has used this theme in a dramatic film.  That said, they do the whole thing wrong.  This movie could have played out like North By Northwest, but it makes the fatal choice of making the main character, Frank, a bumbling idiot.  Well, maybe that's a bit harsh, but his character is pretty awful.  He's shy, awkward, occasionally stammers, and he is always saying the wrong thing.  That would be fine if this was a comedy, but it has only slightly better comedic chops than Schindler's List.  In other words, if you're laughing, you're a racist asshole.  The other characters are fine, I guess, but the fun of romantic thrillers comes from the main characters being romantic and/or thrilling, and Frank is neither.  I wouldn't mind Frank's character if he were funny or dramatic or cute, but he's just a lame character, any way you slice it.

So, how was the acting?  Angelina Jolie played her part pretty darn well.  She had to be the sexy spy lady with a mischievous smile, and she played the part effortlessly.  It's not a great part for her, but she looks good and got to spend time in exotic locations to film it, so I'm not going to criticize her for taking such an easy role.  I liked Paul Bettany as the Interpol inspector that is obsessed with catching Pearce; his obsession makes him both clever and myopic, and I liked the idea of the main policeman in the story having such a critical flaw.  Timothy Dalton has a small role as Bettany's superior, and he has all the charm you would expect of a former James Bond.  Steven Berkoff became famous playing villains in the 80s, and age hasn't made him any less evil.  Sure, he's a little generic as a bad guy, but he's still fun to hate.  I was a little surprised to see Rufus Sewell show up in a movie I was watching (he's not exactly a sign of quality filmmaking), but I didn't mind him at all in his small role.  Johnny Depp, though, was pretty awful.  It's not that he did a bad job with his performance --- he played an awkward amateur quite well --- it's just that every choice he made with his character was the wrong one.  I don't want to be that jerk who argues that movies should only be a certain way, but the rest of The Tourist is not a comedy or a drama, it needs someone to act sexy or suave to make the movie work.  He opted for stupidly awkward.  It didn't work.

It'll take more than a Singapore Sling to forget this mess.

With so much of the cast doing a good job, but the main character falling flat, that leaves writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck with a somewhat tarnished product.  I really liked how the movie looked; the European locations made for some very pretty scenes, and von Donnersmarck clearly has an eye for wide shots.  The action scenes were done pretty well, including a boat chase scene that didn't completely suck.  And I mean that as a compliment.  I liked most of the acting, which shows that he was able to convey his concept of the film to most of the actors.  However, since he wrote Frank's character and directed Depp's performance, I can't avoid criticizing the man.  To give him credit, von Donnersmarck supposedly had less than eleven months to sign up for the movie, write the script, make the movie and have it ready for its premiere, which is hasty at any level of filmmaking, much less something that is expected to be a Hollywood blockbuster.  Now, I get why he and Depp made the choices they made with Frank's character --- it all makes sense by the end of the picture --- but I completely disagree with those choices.

Making bad movies is more tiring than it looks.

This would have just been a disappointingly mediocre movie if I was just left bewildered by Frank's character, but it gets worse.  There's a twist.  SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that Frank is really Alexander Pearce.  Yup.  It's not mistaken identity at all.  He instructed Elise to find someone that fit the same basic description as him (fit and about 6' tall) on the train, and she encountered him by chance, after considering many other options.  So, his plan could have totally failed if she chose any of the other twenty guys on the train that fit his description.  Fabulous.  But it gets better.  When he's alone, Frank acts like Frank.  He never breaks character or gives any hint that there is something beneath his clumsy facade.  I'll be honest with you, I saw the twist coming.  Unfortunately, it was the product of me thinking, "You know what would make this movie much, much worse?"  In other words, the twist negates 95% of the whole damn movie.  You expect me to accept that a master thief's master plan was to be chased by Interpol and hardened criminals until he has the chance to say "Psyche!" and run off into the sunset?  No, I can't accept that.  It's just so bad.  It ruins a perfectly mediocre movie and makes it a bad movie.