The “creepy, unpleasant, and manipulative” movie Roger Ebert detested: “Who in the world would want to see this?”
The entire point of making a movie is to get as many people as possible to watch it, unless the film in question is intentionally or deliberately antagonistic, offensive, and abrasive. What nobody wants is for the industry’s most famous critic to ask why anyone would bother, which is exactly what Roger Ebert did.
It’s both a perk and a curse of the job to watch movies as a livelihood, because if you do it for a living, you don’t really have a say in what you do and don’t see. Well, you could, but that’s how biases creep in, and there’s already too much cinematic hagiography going around to add any more into the melting pot.
Ebert liked what he liked, and he hated what he hated. Horror was arguably his least favourite genre, but he wasn’t the biggest fan of creepy kids, either. Of course, they’re often the domain of the spooky side of things, but a psychological thriller that painted a cherubic youngster as a manipulative mastermind didn’t impress him one bit.
The picture wasn’t rapturously received by anyone, but it was successful at the box office, so Ebert’s inquiry as to why paying customers would waste their time and money on Joseph Ruben’s 1993 psychological thriller, The Good Son, fell on deaf ears, which may have been down to the Macaulay Culkin factor.
The Home Alone child star broke bad as Henry Evans, a diminutive sociopath. When Elijah Wood’s cousin, Mark, is sent to stay with his relatives, he quickly realises something is off about his cousin, as you’d expect when he witnesses him kill the neighbour’s dog, cause a traffic accident on purpose, and try to murder his sister, so there’s definitely something wrong with the precocious and fiercely intelligent kid.
“Who in the world would want to see this movie?” Ebert began a 0.5-star review. “Watching The Good Son, I asked myself that question, hoping that perhaps the next scene would contain the answer, although it never did. 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.”
These days, it’s best known for serving as the unofficial and exponentially darker and more disturbing sequel to the first two Home Alone flicks, which makes more sense than it sounds. Hitting the nail on the head, Ebert summarises Culkin’s character as an “evil little boy,” but not without pointing towards his more psychopathic tendencies as being little more than a “distasteful device by the filmmakers.”
Not to spoil a movie that was released in 1993, but Henry gets his comeuppance. Not only does he get what’s coming to him, but he does so in a climactic scene that Ebert described as “unconvincing, contrived, meretricious, and manipulative, all at once,” and it’s safe to say he wasn’t a fan: “I don’t know when I’ve disliked the ending of a movie more.”
His biggest concern was with the star, as he wondered why the actor’s parents convinced him to make such a disturbing film, leaving him to worry that he might grow up “into another one of those pathetic, screwed-up former child stars who are always spilling their guts on the talk shows.” He loathed The Good Son, and he wasn’t entirely wrong about Culkin’s short-term future.
