Cast: John Cusack, Bobby Coleman, Amanda Peet, Joan Cusack
Running time: 108 minutes

I’ve liked John Cusack ever since watching him in High Fidelity. He’s not necessarily been in great films but always tends to be watchable and delivers a solid and believable performance most of the time.

The same is true of Martian Child. While you would have seen similar films dealing in the same subject matter – the relationship between difficult adopted child and unprepared parent(s) – Mr Cusack’s sensitive performance elevates this film from the usual fodder. Not by a lot though.

Cusack plays David, a successful science-fiction author who is still struggling to recover from his wife's death a couple of years ago. He now wants to go ahead with his and his late wife’s plan to adopt a child, against the advice of his sister, Liz (Cusack’s real life sister Joan) who is a harried mother of two.

David considers adopting Dennis (Coleman), an orphan who spends most of his time in a cardboard box since, believing he is a Martian, he fears exposure to the sun. He gradually wins the boy's trust through gifts of sunglasses and sunblock, and takes Dennis into his house on a trial basis.

Liz feels David might not be ready to handle a child, especially one who wears a weight belt so as not to float away, and steals things to collect data for future Martian research.

Coleman does a great job as the pasty faced “alien” who sometimes speaks in a different language and occasionally breaks into dance, is able to tell the colour of an M&M without looking and can predict the next home run by a baseball player. So much so that the people around him begin to seriously entertain thoughts that he could be a Martian.

The rest of the cast are an accomplished lot, Oliver Platt, Howard Hesseman, Amanda Peet and Anjelica Huston all serve to add gravitas to the proceedings but their time on screen is too fleeting to really flesh out their characters and raise this film out of its mediocrity.

I guess that is what is ultimately disappointing about Martian Child. The story and quality of the assembled cast should have been enough for a good director to make a film that genuinely tugged at the heartstrings but what we get from director Menno Meyjes is a clichéd and somewhat soporific watch. It’s not a bad film at all, it’s just not a very good one either. - Review by S.N.