Godsend

Remember when the words "Robert De Niro" above 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 8-year-old is killed. When Clone Boy passes the age of 8, he starts dreaming someone else’s dreams, and Stamos starts crying a lot. The ending is easy to predict, and the scare-attempts are 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 will survive this crap, but De Niro needs to put a call in to Scorsese right now. While he’s at it, he needs to call director Nick Hamm and demand that Hamm lose his number. If he does it with his Travis Bickle voice, I’m sure Hamm will never call back.