Molly is an uncredited take on Flowers for Algernon, which when filmed as Charly won star Cliff Robertson an Oscar in 1968. Elisabeth Shue plays the title character this time, a winsome autistic suddenly faced with both intelligence and emotional maturation when an experimental procedure patches a faulty connection in her brain. Her busy ad-exec brother (Aaron Eckhart, from Erin Brockovich) tries to help her cope, as well as deal with his own ambiguities about her fluid condition. This eyes-of-a-child thing isn’t necessarily so tired a theme that it couldn’t be done properly again, but Molly suffers from not only being predictable and overly rosy in tone, but from unforgivable lack of character development -- all this for $21 million. At least the colors are bright. D+

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