Child’s Play

Directed by Sidney Lumet, Child’s Play follows Beau Bridges’ Paul Reis as he arrives at an exclusive Catholic boarding school for boys and is soon caught in the middle of a vicious rivalry between two teachers (James Mason’s Jerome Malley and Robert Preston’s Joseph Dobbs). Filmmaker Lumet, working from Leon Prochnik’s screenplay, delivers a static and almost uniformly uninvolving drama that contains few, if any, elements worth embracing, and it’s clear, certainly, that the total lack of interesting, compelling protagonists exacerbates the movie’s myriad of problems and perpetuates its arms-length atmosphere. And although Lumet elicits strong work from his three leads, Child’s Play‘s far-from-enthralling vibe renders the actors’ top-notch efforts moot and, far worse, diminishes the impact of the narrative’s all-too-infrequent emotional beats (eg Jerome learns of the death of his mother). The film admittedly does ramp up in its comparatively intense and intriguing final stretch, although, perhaps unsurprisingly, this turnabout comes much, much too late to compensate for an often astonishingly tedious opening hour – with the end result a complete misfire that remains hopelessly unable to hide its stage origins from start to finish.

* out of ****