I have some bad though hardly surprising news: Bless This Child is very very bad.
Too lazy to do any research and apparently employing no real Catholics whatsoever in the creation of the script the writers of Bless This Child turn out an clunky, implausible star vehicle that falls woefully flat.
The best that can be said about Kim Basinger is that she has beautfiul hair. The untouchable quality that worked so well for her in L.A. Confidential only serves to make Basinger seem disconnected and inaccessible in everything else she does.
There are a couple of good scares in the film, but Rufus Sewell is only laughable as an evil Scientologist-type self-help tycoon in the service of Satan. Hell, who wouldn't be laughable in such a role? Jimmy Smits gets to play generi-fed in a criminally underdeveloped part.
What's left? Well, it's a God versus Satan movie so we must have nuns in habits because everyone knows it's not a really important battle against evil unless everyone is in uniform. Let's not bother with researching any specific mythology or scriptural texts when we talk about Satanic cults. No one will notice if we talk about 16th century druidic runes while pointing to zodiacial glyphs and what looks like the Underwood deviled-ham pitchfork.
Make sure to have an appearance by a renegade Jesuit priest (Ian Holm in possibly the most embarassing three minutes of his life) and a cute little girl to play the new Messiah. Let every scrape be escaped by divine intervention (more on this in a minute) and then get some hokey CGI demons for your finale where "Love conquers all".
Yes, a hug can stop the destruction of the world.
Bless This Child forces us to wonder: if angels can make an appearance 92 times in a movie and stop something terrible from occurring why couldn't they have just shoved Rufus Sewell off a subway platform to begin with and save everyone else the trouble?
