Grade: D+

Verdict: A junky would-be religious thriller.

Details: Starring Kim Basinger and Jimmy Smits. Rated R for violence, drug content and brief profanity. 1 hour, 50 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: "Bless the Child" and pity the audience. The latest cinematic struggle of good vs. evil swipes everything it can from "The Omen," "The Exorcist," "End of Days," "Stigmata" and other Catholic/satanic epics, all while managing to bore the pants off you.

Kim Basinger plays psychiatric nurse Maggie O'Connor, whose junkie sister Jenna (Angela Bettis) drops by one Christmas season, abandoning her newborn daughter in Maggie's care. Oh, incidentally, the star of Bethlehem has recently begun to shine anew in the sky. Hmmm.

Six years later, Cody (Holliston Coleman) has grown into a sweet but borderline-autistic child who starts to evince some odd gifts. She resurrects a dead pigeon, and when she enters a church, the bank of sleeping votive candles flame to life, and the statue of the Madonna starts to weep. Hmmm.

Maybe this has something to do with the serial murders of children in the city (supposedly New York, but "Bless" was shot in Toronto). Five 6-year-olds have turned up dead, and all of them share Cody's birthdate. Hmmm!

Enter Jenna, supposedly clean, now married to New Age guru Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell), founder of a runaway youth ministry called New Dawn. But whose new dawn is it? Could it be . . . Satan's?

An occult custody battle ensues, as Stark spirits Cody away to his postmodern lair inside a rundown tenement. In case we doubt his Evil Purpose, every time Maggie goes near the place, she has visions of computer-generated demons flying around the eaves.

This is a job for detective John Travis (Jimmy Smits), a cult specialist. "He was instrumental in breaking that Santeria case last summer," enthuses a colleague, which is just one of the movie's many howlers.

Of course, if Travis is such a whiz, you wonder why none of the cops, having noticed that all the murdered children were born on the same day of the same year, haven't gone through hospital birth records and placed every kid with the same birthday under surveillance and protection. Um, duh!

This is the kind of movie where one character sees a gang of Stark's goons waiting for her outside a coffee shop. Does she calmly phone the police, or take refuge in the bathroom? No. She hands a second character a gun, her only tool of self-defense, and rushes out onto the street unarmed, where she is 100 percent likely to be killed.

On top of the convenient lapses of logic and common sense, director Chuck Russell ("The Mask," "Eraser") encourages his actors to ham it up. Poor Basinger frowns, clenches her jaw and borders on hysteria for two hours, just as she did in her last bomb, "I Dreamed of Africa." No one is immune, however. Sewell mugs and glowers. Christina Ricci, in a small role as a runaway cult member, seems almost too embarrassed to say some of her lines. And the estimable Ian Holm is given a single scene as a learned churchman, barking about the forces of darkness from his wheelchair.

Bless the Child" is based on a book that must have been very popular at airport bookstores. Apparently, the novel's Cody was the mesenger of the Egyptian goddess Isis, born to battle the forces of some kind of evil stone. The movie transforms those plot points into hoary Christian symbols and clichés, cynically manipulating church iconography for maximum box office lucre.

Besides a brief special-effects manifestation of the devil himself, we get several appearances by spiritual helpmates. There's a kindly black janitor who assures Smits he isn't alone in his investigation; a nice lady on the subway who helps Maggie and the kid get away from the bad guys; and a bearded dude who looks a lot like Jesus who saves Maggie from a car wreck before vanishing into thin air.

Lazy stuff like this makes "Bless" play like a feature version of "Touched by an Angel." Only, an episode with the occasional decapitation, millions of swarming rats and a deus ex machina featuring computer-generated angelic creatures that could make even Della Reese suffer sugar shock. In the end, "Bless the Child" is a demonstration of the evil of banality.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service