Ìý User Rating 
Audiences will buy into the most ordinary screenplay, even one shot through with clichés, if the lead character gives them an emotional hook. If this does not happen, the audience will remain uninvolved, and realise just how routine the film really is.
This is exactly what occurs with "Bless the Child", a supernatural thriller from the producer of "The Omen", which is content to let Kim Basinger play concerned and Rufus Sewell ice-cold arrogant. In fact, as the key member of a troublesome band of Satanists, he often looks bemused rather than evil, as if wondering why he has just been given a particular piece of direction. So far, so one-note.
Equally, the set-up - aside from a few brief, startling moments (like a head falling off a body) - doesn't exactly have you performing cartwheels of excitement as it lays out its rather transparent tussle between good and evil. There is, inevitably, a "special child", the niece of Kim Basinger's nurse, a pale-faced cutie who has to choose between Basinger and God, and Sewell and the Devil. Jimmy Smits gets involved as the FBI agent struggling to stop a series of child murders, a story only loosely connected to the main narrative.
Knife-wielding punks, very helpful angels, scurrying rats and tramps on fire all come and go as the story heaves towards its never-in-doubt conclusion. It's too bad that Kim Basinger hasn't yet milked her deserved success in "LA Confidential". Here, with little to do, she gets her lines in the right order and so matches the input of the rest of the others.
