Made-for-TV drama's fall into one of three camps, those that pursue serious issues of the day and are well-made and well-cast, those that pursue serious issues of the day and are badly made and badly cast, and those that are just plain rubbish. Cloned, as you may well guess by the one star rating, is the latter. Indeed, if it wasn't for the goading of a certain cantankerous patriarch, and the casting of The West Wing's Bradley Whitford, it's more than likely that I would never have watched it, and you would never have to read this review.
Now, the plot itself isn't bad, in a way. In 1997 cloning was starting to make its first big leap into the public imagination with the creation of Dolly the sheep the previous year. Obviously the anxiety this created was ripe fodder for any budding screenwriters who could take the next step and use it threaten humanity itself, and I suppose this is how Cloned came to be 'written' (I use the term loosely). How it then got to be funded, cast, directed and released is another question entirely and, if there were any justice, the local judiciary would be prosecuting as we speak. But I digress.
So Elizabeth Perkins, she of the masculine figure and permanently angular expression, is a scientist (is she? It's never really made clear) named Skye (yes, honestly) working at some dully named fertility clinic. BioFert or something. She and her husband, architect Rick (Whitford), lost their only son Timmy in a boating accident a year or so before and her grieving never ends. Upon receiving a mysterious address from a scientist who is then killed (hilariously I might add), she coerces her husband into taking a trip to some little town down the coast, where she comes upon a boy who looks EXACTLY LIKE HER SON. Dooooo-EEEEEE-ooooo. Her investigations, which for something so serious are entertained for quite some time by her evilly complicit superiors, eventually unearth a veritable Little League team of identical young boys, who all live oddly close to one another. She tries to go public, Rick gets shot in the shoulder, it all ends badly for BioFert.
The many many plot holes in Cloned make it one of those films that's so bad it's almost good. The fact that BioFert honestly believed they could get away with cloning a dozen identical kids without anyone noticing (and in a futuristic, internet-heavy world no less) is baffling, and the need for them to do it in the first place isn't really explained. The lead scientist guy, the awful Alan Rosenberg, seems perfectably capable of growing the profitable organs by themselves, and so I find it hard to believe that he really needed to grow the test kids first. Sigh. Throw in a hopelessly incompetent security officer, and the most one-dimensional bad corporate guy ever, and you have the makings of a real laugh-a-minute crapfest. And it's filmed in Vancouver, obviously, which looks like NOTHING. Will people please stop doing that. |
