I was expecting this to be a pretty good movie. It seemed to have a pretty solid cast (headed by Angela Bassett and Andy Garcia) and an interesting story, vaguely bordering on the supernatural, about a doctor (played by Bassett) who develops an experimental treatment to try to bring children out of comas. In the end, though, the movie disappointed me. The performances - especially that of Bassett - came across to me as somewhat forced, and there was too much of a lead-in to this. The drama of the story is about the parents of young Frankie, who's in a coma after being hit by a car, taking her - against their own doctor's wishes - to Dr. Chase to receive this controversial treatment, but it takes forever to get there, and a great deal of what we watch in the lead-up isn't particularly interesting. Then there is that vaguely hinted at supernatural element. You expect that to be there. You wait for it. Then, in the end, it doesn't appear. Instead, we get a brief, speculative glimpse of what's going on in the mind of a child in a coma, and then we simply move very quickly into the requisite happy ending. Frankie wakes up, and Dr. Chase also gets helpfully healed of her own inner demons, that revolve around the death of her younger brother many years before. Based on what I saw here, there might have been enough meat to the story to make a half hour episode of "The Twilight Zone" - but a 90-minute movie? I don't think so. 3/10
Review of The Lazarus Child
