Bless The Child
by Lev David

Kim Basinger: one of the few Bond Girls to escape a fate of immediate and undying obscurity, and after Jane Seymour, the most annoying and untalented of the lot. If only The Academy could have seen this movie coming when they named her Best Supporting Actress for LA Confidential, certainly one of the biggest cockups in the history of the Oscars.

This time she plays the aunt and surrogate mother of a little girl who is in fact Jesus II. Naturally, there is a bad guy (Rufus Sewell) in the service of Satan getting up to no good. Jimmy Smits (formerly of TV's NYPD Blue) plays a priest-turned-FBI-agent, and Christina Ricci makes a brief and largely unnecessary appearance as a druggie.

The story is low on specifics - the best explanation we get of God's grand plan for the girl is "She'll lead people. Lots of people." We even miss out on the cheesy fun that religious thrillers usually serve up in the form of silly omens and loopy hidden messages in scripture.

In spite of clearly being a shameless attempt at cashing in on the success of The Sixth Sense, Bless the Child has little in common with that movie apart from the little-kid-with-spooky-powers angle. It is far closer to Schwarzenegger's apocalypse flick, End of Days. In both cases we get a Chosen One, a crazy cult, and some pitiful computer-generated demons. Bad as End of Days was, one wishes that Bless the Child had some of its ambition -  instead of Schwarzenegger, we get Basinger. Instead of the somewhat funky Robin Tunney as the new messiah, we get the somewhat dull Holliston Coleman. Instead of The Millennium, we get Easter.

Basinger fully deserves to appear in insipid rubbish such as this, but one cannot help but feel sorry for Smits, Sewell and Ricci, all of whom are playing well below their rank.

CineScene, 2000