BLESS THE CHILD

by Peter Keough

Maybe Michelle Pfeiffer was onto something when she invoked the beyond to resurrect her career in What Lies Beneath. Kim Basinger, another older actress, and with an Oscar to boot, tries the same in Chuck Russell's Bless the Child, but this feeble pastiche of supernatural thrillers makes Robert Zemeckis's waterlogged hit look like Ingmar Bergman.

Basinger is Maggie O'Connor, a spinsterish child therapist whose charity is tested when her strung-out sister Jenna (Angela Bettis) pays a visit on Christmas Eve and leaves Maggie with her newborn daughter. Six years later, Cody (Holliston Coleman) is an autistic cutie with the knack for bringing dead pigeons back to life and making plates spin. This doesn't escape the notice of Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell), a part-time celebrity self-help guru and full-time Satanist who enlists his army of trenchcoat-mafia types to kidnap the kid and switch her from Second Coming to Antichrist. Along the way, in addition to goth-ish teens, the film demonizes women who deviate from the ways of maternal nurturing and anyone else who doesn't pack a set of rosary beads. A frighteningly fundamentalist vision of contemporary society that's shamelessly and ineptly manipulative, Bless the Child hasn't a prayer. At Cinema World, Gardner, the Hoyt Westborough, Leominster, Marlboro, Natick, the Solomon Pond Hoyt, and the Worcester North Showcase.