SummaryA recently widowed science-fiction writer forms an unlikely family with a close friend and a young boy he adopts that claims to be from Mars. The new couple ignores some sage parenting advice from the widower's sister and gets more than they bargained for when a series of strange occurrences lead them to believe that the child's claim may be true... Read More
Directed By:Menno Meyjes
Written By:Seth Bass, Jonathan Tolins, David Gerrold
Martian Child
Metascore
Mixed or Average
48
User score
Mixed or Average
5.8
My Score
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Top Cast
Metascore
Mixed or Average
48
35% Positive
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
50% Mixed
13 Reviews
13 Reviews
15% Negative
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
75
Cusack, of course, is the perfect Anti-Schmaltz. His rapid-fire delivery makes everything he says sound like it's just pouring from his brain to his mouth, so that even the sappiest dialogue is rendered sincere.
70
Knockout performances by John Cusack and child actor Bobby Coleman help legitimize a whimsical but sententiously moralizing script.
63
The film plot about the needy kid who redeems a male loner has been done to death, and on the surface, Martian Child just looks like another entry in the genre, a close follower to “About A Boy.”
50
Martian Child wants to make us cry. It nearly made me gag. This is an exercise in shameless and inept emotional manipulation.
50
Cusack makes a half-hearted attempt to connect with Coleman, but chemistry is fatally absent and small wonder: Dennis is a unsettlingly strange creature who could well be from another planet.
40
Only in Hollywood can a movie about alien children be boring. Even if the kid isn’t really an alien (no spoilers), there’s still opportunity galore for the wild and the weird.
25
It's off in many directions - false in its details, false in its relationships, false in its emotions - but probably the first and worst thing that needs to be said about it is that it's also overlong and dull.
User score
Mixed or Average
5.8
40% Positive
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
40% Mixed
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
20% Negative
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
Sep 9, 2024
4
John Cusack continues his late-'00s slide in this spacey, whitewashed adaptation of a semi-fictional novella. Cusack plays a moody, depressed science fiction writer who adopts a similarly introverted six-year-old as a way to move on from an intense personal loss. Following the formula to a tee, the two then struggle to understand each other for the rest of the picture before feeling their way to a generic happy ending, complete with feel-good self-improvement montage. The film halfheartedly drops sporadic hints that the child might really be from outer space, as he so boldly proclaims, but never completely commits to that direction. Instead, it's content to just lean back into an easy, overplayed routine and let the chips fall where they may. The narration, especially, is so passive it's hard to imagine what it does stand for. Even the shoehorned introduction of a love interest for Cusack (a heavily criticized change from the source, in which the narrator is gay) is lightly dangled over the screen before being tossed aside and forgotten. Bland, faceless and safe, Martian Child is family-friendly to a fault.
