Z/Web

Unquestionably one of the worst films I’ve seen in many years. The dialog is stilted, the plot ridiculous. In the opening scene, in which the boy is killed, everything is done with such exaggeration and foreshadowing it’s absurd: we see the mom worrying about where her son is (he’s playing near the street) which is stupid because there’s nothing to say this isn’t another ordinary day in which the little boy does not get killed. And of course this happens to be the kid’s birthday, which is excessively dramatic. The boy is a terrible actor, too, though he’s okay when not talking. The plot is just bizarre. It sounds simple enough — family’s kid dies and they replace him with a clone. But instead of this being a drama about the morality of cloning, the film sinks into some sort of weird horror mode where the clone seemingly has memories of his previous life. Just silly. How Robert DeNiro got hook-winked into this mess I’ll never know.

Not as bad as I expected, but strangely flat. The cat’s commentary and jokes aren’t funny, and the plot — the cat trying to save the dog — isn’t engaging or dramatic. The humans are just cartoons, not fleshed out enough for us to care. The whole thing adds up to sheer boredom.