I enjoyed Bless The Child, and the good performance of Kim Basinger, but when all was said and done, I could not help dwelling on the films shortcomings, fallacies and holes.
1 Length. At 1hr 38mins, it is a good 35 minutes shorter than the average film nowadays, and this, while making it a shorter (and therefore more palatable...???logic???) for the punters, the film was unable to do justice to the themes and characters it created.
2 The common fallacy among films that deal with themes of world domination and conquest. Why America, and more specifically, why New York? Why was the child born in America, and why was the bad guy looking in New York for it? Surely if (as the casting implies) the child is the product of the stereotypical inbred mutant hicks (complete with red hair and feckles a la "Carrie", 1976...also "The Gift", 2000) of Southern US, then why New York and not Smallsville Texas? These kind of issues are completely ignored, and indeed MUST be in a film this short.
3 Bad guy. It is either an amazing co-incidence that he found and married the mother, or there was some force that brought her to him. Does he marry all drugged out homeless people? Or does he think the best place to look for mothers of children born on the special date is in rehab centres? Again, undealt with. Does he have supernatural powers or not? How come he can cast a spell to make a guy want to commit suicide, and yet can be simply killed with a few lead pellets? Earlier in the movie he manages to magic the bullets out of Kim's gun - why couldn't he do it with the FBI guy? Surely a supernatural guy deserves a supernatural death.
4 - What of the nuns? How do they know that Kim is on her way with the child? We never see her tell them she is on her way. Also the obligatory FBI agent - when he is told that "they have got Cody", he seems to know that Cody has been rescued and her recapture is news to him, yet he is never told in the first place. When the nuns pray, are we to assume that because there are more of them, God is more likely to hear them, and give a quantitative response? If they hadn't prayed, would God have just sat back and watched as his new messiah got diced? If not, then why have the nun-praying scene when there are so many holes undealt with?
5 - What of this mysterious Christian anti-occult cult led by Ian Holm? Why don't they have superpowers like the occult guys? All they do is get a young guy to drive a car for Kim, and then he dies before the getaway. Why can't they become angels for a second, like the demon granny does? That would have been cool. This sub-plot came accross as just the lets-explain-some-of-the-rules part of the film, which should have come in much earlier. Then again, they don't stick to their own rules, so I guess it doesnt really matter.
It is my guess that the film was an adaptation of a book (these often make too many assumptions) and that there was some psycho reel cutter in the editing room who had "shorter is better, shorter is better" going round in his head. The way I felt about the film was this: nice dress rehearsal - when are you going to make the film?
6/10 - hordes of unused potential
