Mark Evans, played with typical
wide-eyed naivete by an adorably small Elijah Wood, is not having a
good time of it. A mere 10-years-old, no
sooner has he lost his mother to cancer than his father (David
Morse)
announces that he has to fly to Japan on business for two weeks. While
daddy jets around the globe, Mark will stay with his Aunt Susan and Uncle
Wallace in Maine – where they hope that some time playing with
their young son, Henry, will help the traumatised youngster to come to
terms with his repressed grief.
There are two flaws in this plan. First is that Susan and Wallace are
nursing a throbbing lump of grief themselves – their youngest son,
Richard, recently drowned in the bathtub. Second is that Henry is played
by briefly-popular child irritant Macauley Culkin and, worse, he’s
eeeeevil.
Yes, The Good Son is the monumentally ill-advised psycho-horror that
was supposed to catapult Culkin from slapstick superstar into the world
of proper grown-up acting. Unfortunately, while Culkin’s insipid
pallor and cold doll-like eyes were actually perfectly suited to the
portrayal of remorseless malevolence, the movie itself is an absolute
farce of overboiled melodrama and laughable contrivances, made all the
more glaring by having the protagonists as spunky pre-pubescents. And
poor Elijah Wood gets dragged along for the ride.
At first Henry seems like your typical precocious brat – he smokes,
breaks windows and picks on his little sister. All the while, he maintains
an angelic countenance around adults, so they never suspect his wilder
inclinations. After only a few days of rambunctious play with Mark, Henry
graduates to more devious pranks, causing a ten car pile-up by dropping
a human dummy off a bridge, and later shooting a neighbourhood dog with
a home-made crossbow.
Remarkably, Mark still seems torn between viewing Henry as a portrait
of a serial killer-in-waiting or just a slightly rebellious pal. The
fact that building a home-made crossbow isn’t normal behaviour
doesn’t seem to cross his mind.
Thankfully, the plot nudges Mark towards a moment of clarity as Henry
continues to escalate his mayhem, attempting to kill his sister by hurling
her in the direction of perilously thin ice. Mark is finally convinced
that the blond bastard is a full-blown psycho-loon but, of course, he
must now convince the adults that the sweet-natured Henry is actually
pure evil in child form. Do they believe him? What do you think?
Once again Mark’s salvation comes in the form of Henry’s
alarming inability to scale back his carnage (and the movie’s need
to thunder to the end credits in just over 80 minutes) and so, after
only a few days of tepid psychological warfare, Henry all but confesses
to drowning his brother and then tries to kill his mother by shoving
her over a cliff. Mark intervenes just in time, but the two kids end
up hanging over the precipice, with only poor Susan’s grip to keep
them from plummeting to their doom. As she weighs up the pros and cons
of her sadistic biological spawn and the enormous baby-blue saucer eyes
of Elijah Wood, she makes the only sensible decision and drops Macauley
Culkin to be smashed into jelly on the jagged rocks below.
This rather ludicrous and tasteless finale might actually carry some
emotional heft if any attempt was made to explain just why Henry, with
his loving family and idyllic rural childhood, suddenly becomes a murderous
monster but as the movie is content to leave him as a random and inexplicable
loon the whole affair has about as much depth as the bathwater in which
Henry presumably dispatched his baby brother.
Need to know: The Good Son was based on a screenplay by Booker Prize
winning author Ian McEwan, who promptly disowned the project when it
became a Culkin vehicle and was reworked accordingly. In a rather creepy
twist, the siblings that suffer at the hands of Henry’s bloodthirsty
mania were played by Culkin’s real life brother and sister – though
younger brother Rory only appears in a photograph as the deceased Richard.
The risible conclusion to the movie prompted Roger Ebert to call it “unconvincing,
contrived, meretricious and manipulative, all at once.” He went
on to declare: “I don't know when I've disliked the ending of a
movie more.”
The Good Son was directed by Joseph Ruben, who also helmed the similarly
themed family-in-peril shockers The Stepfather (starring Lost’s
Terry O’Quinn) and Sleeping with the Enemy, in which Julia Roberts
battles her psychotic ex-husband. The Good Son was originally to have
been directed by Michael Lehmann, who shot the cult Winona Ryder black
comedy Heathers, but he left the project after clashing with the
influx of Culkins. The Good Son went straight to video in the UK, several
years after its US debut, following the real life James Bulger murder
case in which two young boys abducted and murdered a toddler.
Honourable mentions: Elijah Wood made his film debut in Back to the Future
Part II as the young futuristic tyke who challenges Marty McFly to an
arcade shoot-out in the 2015 diner. Thus by the time The Good Son rolled
around, Wood was already a rising child star thanks to well-received
lead roles in Radio Flyer, Forever Young and The Adventures of Huck Finn.
He followed The Good Son with the notorious box office bomb North, in
which he played a young boy who has himself legally separated from his
parents and sets off around the world to find a new family. Following
this double whammy of poisonous reviews and box office failure, Wood
appeared to step back from the spotlight (the forgettable big screen
remake of Flipper aside) and eventually returned as a young adult in
movies like Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm, the meteor disaster flick
Deep Impact and the Robert Rodriguez teen horror, The Faculty. And then,
of course, came Middle-earth…
