Part child-prodigy flick, part Death Wish, all bad
The Book of Henry 12A cert, 105 min
Dir Colin Trevorrow Starring Naomi Watts, Jaeden Lieberher, Jacob Tremblay, Lee Pace, Sarah Silverman, Maddie Ziegler, Dean Norris
Some turkeys get delivered in perfect readiness for Christmas. Others fly the coop, moulting and deranged, in the overheated days of mid-june, destined to be nothing more than roadkill. Such a release is The Book of Henry, a sort of crackpot kidinventor prodigy flick that transforms itself insanely into some kind of Mumsnet Death Wish. Whatever it thinks it is, it’s several planets away from good. The Book of Henry is what you get to do when you’ve just made Jurassic World, and no one is saying no – and “No” is the only response to Gregg Hurwitz’s script that might legitimately be uttered.
It has a whizzkid boy-hero called Henry (Midnight Special’s Jaeden Lieberher, deserving better here), who is a quietly brilliant mastermind, with a lavishly overproduced wood cabin near his home full of Rube Goldberg gadgetry. He has kept his single mum Susan (Naomi Watts) afloat with some genius manoeuvres on the stock market and has a protective relationship towards his younger brother Peter (Room’s Jacob Tremblay). Trevorrow directs Tremblay abysmally, getting him to turn on the waterworks ickily when his brother is abruptly diagnosed with a brain tumour. But the film’s handbrake lurches into eye-widening trauma aren’t finished there. Henry has become suspicious that the police commissioner who lives next door (Dean Norris) has been abusing his stepdaughter (Maddie Ziegler), but it’s almost as if the screenwriter has concocted a perfect, isolated, utterly fake instance of paedophilia that only an 11-year-old is in a position to stop.
So it is that the most batty phase of the melodrama begins, with Susan apprised of the crisis and blindly following her son’s blueprints for a vendetta killing. What’s a Watts to do? You can’t blame her for getting on with the job, only for trusting this nightmare to work out tolerably in the first place.