Still mourning the loss of his mother, Mark Evans (Elijah Wood) is sent to live with his aunt Susan (Wendy Crewson) and uncle Wallace (Daniel Hugh Kelly) as his father Jack (David Morse) must travel to Tokyo to secure a business deal. Mark quickly befriends his cousins Connie (Quinn Culkin) and Henry (Macaulay Culkin), with both Mark and Henry often engaging in excursions that skirt the line of acceptable. However, as Mark takes notice of Henry's sadistic tendencies that grow more and more extreme, Mark tries to find a way to stop Henry's impulses before they kill any one.
The Good Son was the brainchild of English writer Ian McEwan who was invited by 20th Century Fox following the publication of McEwan's novel The Child in Time with McEwan assigned to write something on the nature of evil with a possible focus on children. McEwan wrote the screenplay which was well received by Fox but deemed insufficiently commercial and the screenplay was floated to various parties until producer Mary Ann Page picked it up independently and tried to get it setup in the late 80s at Universal Studios only for the project to collapse due to lack of funding. Following the success of both Home Alone and the Silence of the Lambs, Fox chose to revisit the project which they now believed to be more viable given audience reception to movie's focused on children as well as more extreme forms of thrills. Macaulay Culkin's father and business manager Kit Culkin got wind of the project and used his clout to get Macaulay the role as Henry Evans believing a darker role would strengthen his viability and made his casting contingent in the film contingent for his return to Home Alone 2 which Fox agreed. Upon release the film performed modestly making $60 million worldwide against an estimated $17-28 million budget while critical reception skewed predominantly negative with many critical of Macaulay Culkin's casting as a killer given his prominence in Home Alone. There's an underlying idea behind The Good Son, it's just buried by some rather hokey excess that doesn't mine it all that well.
Given that the film was released at the zenith of domestic thrillers and home invasion thrillers popularized by the likes of Fatal Attraction and a wake of similar films like Sleeping with the Enemy, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, and Misery just to name a few, The Good Son follows many of those conventions of the genre to a "T" with the main difference being the focus on child characters rather than adults. I will say that Elijah Wood is really good in the role of Mark and even though it's not especially well written and requires him to say some clunky lines, it's a testament to Wood's charisma as an actors that the movie's as watchable as it is. I also rather liked Quinn Culkin as his cousin Connie and the two have some good scenes together. Most of the adult actors aren't given much presence in the story and really only exist to serve as mechanisms in the plot, but Wendy Crewson does have some decent scenes with Elijah Wood with him looking to her (rather blatantly and without nuance) as a surrogate mother figure. This brings us to Macaulay Culkin himself as the villain and a major reason why this movie doesn't work. Between Joseph Ruben's overwrought direction, Ian McEwan's clunky overly "poetic" screenplay, and Culkin's slightly overly precocious delivery that worked in Home Alone but is distracting here, the character of Henry feels really off in a manner that breaks the immersion of this premise. Culkin and the material treats Henry as a borderline cackling supervillain and because the rest of the movie tries to be more grounded (relatively) it feels really out of place especially when you have Culkin saying things like "don't be afraid to fly Mark" that feels incredibly forced coming from this character.
While I disagree with the controversy surrounding this movie when it first came out stemming from the thought "Macaulay Culkin shouldn't do movies like this because he was in Home Alone", I can agree it's not a very good movie. While there are occasional moments that do work, the actual thriller aspects of this film are so cartoonishly over the top that it finds itself unfavorably compared against the glut of similar films of the time. There's plenty of "evil kid" movies that have done this movie better (see The Bad Seed for instance) so the only reason to see this would be the novelty of early 90s Macaulay Culkin playing a violent slightly foul mouthed sociopath.
The Good Son was the brainchild of English writer Ian McEwan who was invited by 20th Century Fox following the publication of McEwan's novel The Child in Time with McEwan assigned to write something on the nature of evil with a possible focus on children. McEwan wrote the screenplay which was well received by Fox but deemed insufficiently commercial and the screenplay was floated to various parties until producer Mary Ann Page picked it up independently and tried to get it setup in the late 80s at Universal Studios only for the project to collapse due to lack of funding. Following the success of both Home Alone and the Silence of the Lambs, Fox chose to revisit the project which they now believed to be more viable given audience reception to movie's focused on children as well as more extreme forms of thrills. Macaulay Culkin's father and business manager Kit Culkin got wind of the project and used his clout to get Macaulay the role as Henry Evans believing a darker role would strengthen his viability and made his casting contingent in the film contingent for his return to Home Alone 2 which Fox agreed. Upon release the film performed modestly making $60 million worldwide against an estimated $17-28 million budget while critical reception skewed predominantly negative with many critical of Macaulay Culkin's casting as a killer given his prominence in Home Alone. There's an underlying idea behind The Good Son, it's just buried by some rather hokey excess that doesn't mine it all that well.
Given that the film was released at the zenith of domestic thrillers and home invasion thrillers popularized by the likes of Fatal Attraction and a wake of similar films like Sleeping with the Enemy, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, and Misery just to name a few, The Good Son follows many of those conventions of the genre to a "T" with the main difference being the focus on child characters rather than adults. I will say that Elijah Wood is really good in the role of Mark and even though it's not especially well written and requires him to say some clunky lines, it's a testament to Wood's charisma as an actors that the movie's as watchable as it is. I also rather liked Quinn Culkin as his cousin Connie and the two have some good scenes together. Most of the adult actors aren't given much presence in the story and really only exist to serve as mechanisms in the plot, but Wendy Crewson does have some decent scenes with Elijah Wood with him looking to her (rather blatantly and without nuance) as a surrogate mother figure. This brings us to Macaulay Culkin himself as the villain and a major reason why this movie doesn't work. Between Joseph Ruben's overwrought direction, Ian McEwan's clunky overly "poetic" screenplay, and Culkin's slightly overly precocious delivery that worked in Home Alone but is distracting here, the character of Henry feels really off in a manner that breaks the immersion of this premise. Culkin and the material treats Henry as a borderline cackling supervillain and because the rest of the movie tries to be more grounded (relatively) it feels really out of place especially when you have Culkin saying things like "don't be afraid to fly Mark" that feels incredibly forced coming from this character.
While I disagree with the controversy surrounding this movie when it first came out stemming from the thought "Macaulay Culkin shouldn't do movies like this because he was in Home Alone", I can agree it's not a very good movie. While there are occasional moments that do work, the actual thriller aspects of this film are so cartoonishly over the top that it finds itself unfavorably compared against the glut of similar films of the time. There's plenty of "evil kid" movies that have done this movie better (see The Bad Seed for instance) so the only reason to see this would be the novelty of early 90s Macaulay Culkin playing a violent slightly foul mouthed sociopath.