aul (Kinnear) and Jessie Duncan (Romijn-Stamos) enjoy an almost perfect life. Their son Adam (Bright) celebrates his eighth birthday while Paul mulls a lucrative job offer that would pull them away from the pervasive urban decay that surrounds their New York existence. Sadly, before the decision can be made, Adam is killed in a freak automobile accident, and their plans are put on hold.
As Paul and Jessie attempt to make sense of the tragedy, they are approached by Richard Wells (De Niro), a doctor who offers them a seemingly impossible opportunity: to clone Adam and regain the family they once had. Before long, the grief-stricken parents find themselves considering Wells' proposition, which will require them to sever all ties with family and friends and move to an upstate community where they know no one.
Adam is successfully cloned, but as he reaches his eighth birthday he begins seeing strange visions. Paul and Jessie, knowing that Adam now lives on "borrowed time," try to figure out why his life has become a never-ending series of nightmares, and discover Dr. Wells growing mysteriously closer to their son than the typical boundaries of a doctor-patient relationship necessitate. As their marriage begins to dissolve, Paul fights to figure out the secrets behind Adam's visions, save his family and escape the Faustian pact he's made with Wells.
A talented cast can't redeem this clunker
Nick Hamm makes his directorial debut with Godsend (following a string of failed British crossovers) and arrives on American shores with an inauspicious, inert genre picture that starts at zero and goes nowhere fast. The concept, about grieving parents who clone their dead kid, might have been captivating if it were rendered for dramatic rather than suspenseful effect, but before audiences can whisper, "I see dead people," Hamm introduces subplot on top of subplot about ghosts and supernatural specters that haunt the Duncan family and unseat the material's potentially entertaining science-fact leanings.
There are so many problems with the execution of this concept that's it's tough to know where to start. The film opens with an idyllic familial setting, which in movies like this presages the terrible tragedies that are yet to come; it might be interesting to see how a fractured family might react to the same proposition, but it's an opportunity that's never explored, since Hamm throws the characters into such a happy homestead that the audience practically thrives at the possibility the characters will be ripped apart. Once the cloning business takes over, all sense of human drama leaps out the window, creepy kids start popping up, and it becomes little more than an unsolved mystery whose explanation cannot possibly justify why we've sat through two hours of hallucinogenic imagery and mediocre character development.
There is little or no focus for the storyline—is it the idea that this kid is haunted we're supposed to be freaked out by, or just the idea of cloning itself?—and Hamm lends each scene the same leaden gravitas as every other one; by the time composer Brian Tyler's score has crescendoed to impossible peaks of dramatic intensity, all the viewers care about is what will expedite them getting out that exit door as quickly as humanly possible. Instead, the ending feels (rightly, according to Hamm himself) like the test-marketed result of audiences choosing their own adventure, melding a slipshod combination of comeuppance, redemption and foreshadowing that satisfies none of the film's storylines nor even the most patient viewer's expectations. At longer than two hours, the running time exhaustively delves into the characters' worlds, but it does so with so little regard to any kind of emotional connection that we couldn't care less who lives or dies, who clones or is cloned, or whether this poor kid sees ghosts, goblins or just Haley Joel Osment.
