Was Ebert Right? The Good Son (1993)

Today, we are looking at the Macaulay Culkin thriller, THE GOOD SON, and asking the question: Was Ebert Right? 

Who in the world would want to see this movie? Watching “The Good Son,” I asked myself that question, hoping that perhaps the next scene would contain the answer, although it never did.

I have asked this question when watching various films too but I didn't ask it while watching THE GOOD SON. The film is made for 

The movie is a creepy, unpleasant experience, made all the worse because it stars children too young to understand the horrible things we see them doing.

He says the film is "creepy" and says that like it's a bad thing. It's a horror film. "Creepy" is a a good thing. He also says that the child actors are too young to understand what is happening to them. This is very disingenuous and kind of insulting to the child actors. Elijah Wood and Macaulay Culkin were 12 years old when the film was shot so they were well aware what was going on and were able to understand what their characters were doing. I am the same age as them and I understood what was happening. I could see if they were under the age of 10, but them being pre-teens makes a difference. 

They are allowed to roam freely all over the island, which seems to have been designed as a series of death traps for kids. Mark almost falls out of a towering tree house, and then, led by Henry, stands on the edges of cliffs, walks around the rim of a deep well, runs down the railroad tracks, and eventually watches with horror as Henry kills a dog and later causes a highway crash by dropping a human form off a bridge.

I remember seeing THE GOOD SON in the theater on opening night and thinking just how dangerous this island was, but then I thought "Henry has lived on this island his entire life, and he is evil, so of course he is going to take Mark on a tour of the most dangerous places he knows. He is showing off as well as giving the audience a bunch of places where the climax of the film could take place. We know its going to take place on the cliff because that is where Henry's mother goes to be sad, but the filmmakers want to throw other locations at us to try to keep us off their scent.

This is a very evil little boy; the movie could have been called “Henry, Portrait of a Future Serial Killer.”

I have to wonder if the character is named Henry because of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. It fits a bit too well to not to.

But what rings false is that the MacAulay Culkin character isn’t really a little boy at all. 

His speech is much too sophisticated and ironic for that, and so is his reasoning and his cleverness. 

The character would be more frightening, perhaps, if he did seem young and naive. This way, he seems more like a distasteful device by the filmmakers, who apparently think there is a market for glib one-liners by child sadists. 

This is one of the biggest problems I have with the film. We never see Henry as a real kid. The moment we see him, we know he is evil. The film never tries to show us he is anything but evil. The trailers and TV spots show him as being evil. They don't even try to hide it. Hell, a big deal was made of Culkin saying the "F" word. In the film, Henry says to Mark, "Don't fuck with me." This was a huge deal back then because having the HOME ALONE kid, who spent two films battling crooks trying to steal from his family, and one film battling bees while trying to find his friend's mood ring in MY GIRL, threatening his cousin with such vulgar language was not seen often. This scene could have been powerful if they gave us Henry being a kid. If everything we saw leading up to this moment was the Kevin McCalistar from HOME ALONE, then the mask dropped. This could have been a big moment, but the film and the filmmakers dropped the ball. 

This is the same problem I had with THE SHINING. We KNOW Jack Nicholson is going to go crazy. It's fucking JACK NICHOLSON! Of course, he is going to lose his mind and start killing people. The film tries to build up to this but we already know where the film is going. Had they cast someone who was a bit more "normal", the film would have worked a lot better. Casting Macaulay Culkin as a evil kid seemed like a good choice, and he is fine in the role, but they never let the character be a kid before he is shown as evil. All of the marketing for the film was "See how evil Macaulay Culkin is?" 

Everything leads up to a cliff-hanging climax that somehow manages to be unconvincing, contrived, meretricious and manipulative, all at once. I don’t know when I’ve disliked the ending of a movie more.

The climax of the film, which sees Henry's mother holding on to each kid as they dangle over the cliff the film has convinced us wasn't going to be the final resting spot of Henry. She holds on to Henry with one hand and Mark in the other with her having to decide whether she lets her son (evil) live or Mark (good). Ebert is exactly right with it being unconvincing, contrived, meretricious, and manipulative. It is a terrible climax and we all wish the filmmakers had gone with something less stupid.

The screenplay is by Ian McEwan, that British master of the macabre (“The Comfort Of Strangers” was based on one of his novels). But don’t blame him. He has already published an article in a London newspaper complaining that once the Culkin family came aboard the movie, the original screenplay was the last of anyone’s considerations. The story was shaped to fit MacAulay, he charges. Strange. You’d imagine that the tyke’s parents and managers would have paid good money to keep him out of this story.

Quite the contrary, Mr. Ebert. Culkin's dad, who was also his manager, insisted Culkin be cast in the film. The story goes, HOME ALONE 2 was coming up and 20th Century Fox wanted Culkin in the film, but Culkin's dad had read the script to THE GOOD SON and wanted Culkin to star in the film. His father even told Fox he was going to pull Culkin from HOME ALONE 2 if they didn't cast him in THE GOOD SON. Culkin got paid a ton of money to do both films but whether it was a good decision overall is a different matter.

One of the reasons the movie feels so unwholesome is that Macaulay seems too young and innocent to play a character this malevolent. At times, hearing the things he’s made to say, you want to confront the filmmakers who made him do it, and ask them what they were thinking of.

For that matter, what were Culkin’s parents thinking of when they pushed him into a movie where he drowns his baby brother, tries to drown his little sister, and wants to push his mother off a cliff? If this kid grows up into another one of those pathetic, screwed-up former child stars who are always spilling their guts on the talk shows, a lot of adults will share the blame. 

Culkin is fine in the role with a few line reads being flat. I have said the problem is we never see Henry as a real kid and only as an evil kid, but he also never goes far enough. I don't know if it was the direction Culkin was given, his father trying to coach him from off camera, or Culkin not being able to go any further, but Henry feels a bit flat in the evil department, He tells Mark not to fuck with him, kills a dog with a gun he made that shoots bolts, and drowns his baby brother off screen. These are by-the-numbers moments that have to appear in killer kid films in some form. The film doesn't go beyond this. We never see Henry lose his mind Nicolas Cage style or let his anger build over the course of the film until he can't stand it anymore and takes it out on everyone. The film doesn't take chances. It plays by the same book that films like THE BAD SEED and THE OMEN, but doesn't really do anything outside of the casting of Macaulay Culkin, to stand out from the pack. 

Ebert also seems to imply that starring in THE GOOD SON could lead Culkin to being a washed-up child star like so many that have come before him. He says that he questions why his parents would allow him to star in a film where he is evil and kills another kid and tries to kill more. The thing is, and I have been saying this since I heard Gene Siskel complain about having the hero of the first two CHILD'S PLAY films be a kid, KIDS WANT TO MAKE HORROR FILMS. They love it. Like I said  before, I am the same age as the two stars of THE GOOD SON and I would have loved to have made this film. It seemed like it was a lot of fun to make. I mean, who doesn't want to play an evil character? There are many directors out there who make sure that their child actors are ok with what they are going to be doing AND know that there is no such thing as Chucky or any other fictional killer. Stanley Kubrick was, very famously, very protective over with the actor who played Danny in THE SHINING. He knew that some of the stuff in that film could fuck the kid up so he made sure to keep him away from as much as he could. Of course, that kid was six when they were making THE SHINING, so the kid had no yet experienced that many things in life yet, so Kubrick was definitely in the right. In THE GOOD SON, these kids were 12 when the film was shot so they had lived twice the life that Danny from THE SHINING. By the time I was 12, I had already seen my first R-rated film (ROBOCOP), seen my first R-rated film in the theater (TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY), and was had a small collection of R-rated films in every genre on VHS. I had seen a lot of things that my classmates had not seen. With Culkin and Elijah Wood being in the film business, they had to have seen things their classmates had not. 

I also believe the people working on the set were good to the kids. I think the only person who wasn't was Culkin's father. It seems like everyone else was good with the kids and made sure they knew what was real and what wasn't. I don't think anything in this film would have traumatized them in any way and they probably had fun dangling off the cliff at the end, which they did for real.

The movie is rated R. Market surveys indicate that kids want to see it, probably because it stars their “Home Alone” hero. This is not a suitable film for young viewers. I don’t care how many parents and adult guardians they surround themselves with. And somewhere along the line, a parent or adult guardian should have kept MacAulay out of it, too. 

He's right. I remember the kids all talking about this film at school. None of the other parents would take them to see the film and they all had to ask me about. My parents had always been pretty open about what I watched with them only telling me they kind of forbid a ffew films from the house. None of these were "banned" from the house for moral reasons. They were "banned" because they same them as being a bit too "extreme" for my young eyes. Films like HELLRAISER and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE were not allowed in the house, but that didn't last for very long after I told them I was going to probably see them anyway at a friend's house.

Anyway, kids wanted to see the film because Culkin was in it. I mean, the film opened at #1 at the box office and brought in $60 million on a $17 million budget.  The film didn't crash and burn at the box office like so many horror films did during that time. It was also a big renter at the video store probably due to all the kids whose parents wouldn't take them to the theater to see it.

So... Was Ebert Right?

Sort of. 

The film is very underwhelming. This should have been a slam dunk. The film's directork Joseph Rubin, gave us THE STEPFATHER, which is great "killer hiding in plain sight" film. He should have been able to make this material shine but he doesn't. I can't fault the actors. They all do their best with what they have.

The film just isn't exciting or scary. Culkin isn't given much to work with and he comes across more as a kid playing evil than an actual evil kid. He should have watched the kid from THE OMEN. That is how you portray evil.

The climax of the film is very lackluster too. We have see scenes like this before nothing new is brought to the table. By the time the kids are hanging off the cliff, we kind of stop caring. Wood wasn't being believed despite their being tons of evidence to back his claims up and it becomes tiring. I know this is supposed to be to drum up suspence but it isn't done very well.

The film does do some things right. The film is very well shot, capturing the rainy, cold Maine weather very well. The film also has a creepy overtone to it.  The film is overtly scary, but it does feel very creepy at times. There's just something about kids doing bad things to other kids that feels worse than if it were adults doing things to other adults. Wood is also good as Mark. We feel his frustration in trying to out Henry and we feel for him. 

So, should you see the film? I think you should give it a go even if it's just to see what the film is like. The film is very 90s and fits in very well with films like THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE and UNLAWFUL ENTRY. While the film isn't nearly as good as those films, it does many things right and offers up a fair bit amount of entertainment.