Reviewed by: Joe

Directed by: Nick Hamm

Produced by: Michael Paseornek, Marc Butan, Sean O'Keefe, & Cathy Schulman

Cast: Robert De Niro, Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Cameron Bright, & Jenny Levine

Released: April 30th, 2004

Drama, Suspense/Horror and Thriller 1 hr. 42 min. After their young son, Adam (Bright), is killed in a freak accident, a couple (Kinnear, Romijn-Stamos) approach an expert (De Niro) in stem cell research about bringing him back to life through an experimental (and illegal) cloning and regeneration process. When Adam comes back to them, however, he's... different.

What should be a film attempting to answer the moral and ethical issues brought up the revolutionary concept of human cloning only leaves you with the question of why you would pay eight dollars for an unimaginative and bewildering horror knock-off. Even if you go into this film giving the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt for ripping-off Rosemary’s Baby, you’ll still have problems with the film’s uneven and utterly confusing second half. There are so many things wrong with this film that it is hard to decide where to start. Let’s first focus on the reason why the couple would want to clone their son in the first place. The subject is brought up early in the film but the wife refuses to have another child and pushes the husband toward the cloning concept. If they had left it at that then that would be fine but later on in the film they show the couple having sex, before being broken up by the screams of their cloned son. Oh! You're opposed to the having a child through moral methods but not to having the occasional “wink-wink”?

Another problem is that the film tends to throw bits and pieces of religion into the film’s background (the most obvious being the “Godsend Institute”) and yet the question of morals and ethics within a religious context are clearly excluded from almost any conversations. And how unsatisfying and completely confusing can you make an ending for a film that was practically a waste of time to begin with? Somehow the filmmakers managed to screw that up as well (without giving anything away, practically nothing is answered). What prevented this film from getting an absolute failure would have to be its intriguing first half and engaging performance from Robert DeNiro but not even those things can resurrect this beaten and bloody horse picture.