Lorraine Franklin (Nancy Travis) is a Las Vegas showgirl and a single mom. She spends her days doting on her adorable 7-year old, Albert (Haley Joel Osment). Albert spends his days awash in his mother's love and practicing the tricks he's learned from his idol, the magician Antoine. When Lorraine is killed in a car crash, Albert has no-one to care for him. His father is years down the road, Lorraine's family is non-existent and her friends can't take him on the road with them. The task of raising Albert falls to Lorraine's foster sister, Harriet, played by Whoopi Goldberg. Harriet, a single businesswoman, doesn't care to make room in her life for the son of a childhood friend with whom she hadn't talked in years. Albert doesn't want to leave his friends in Las Vegas to live in Newark, New Jersey with a woman he's never met and who doesn't appear to want him.

On the plane ride to Newark, Albert makes a new friend to help him through his crisis -- literally. A face in a coloring book comes to life as soon as he draws its mouth. When he finishes the rest of the face, out pops a round-nosed, 6-foot Frenchman named Bogus (played by the appropriately proportioned Gerard Depardieu). As Albert uses Bogus to deal with his loss, we come to realize that the repressed Harriet could use a little Bogus in her life as well.

BOGUS is about heartache and healing, responsibility and imagination. It's about growing up and about being a kid. At times it can be funny and touching. But it is not a very good movie.

I just didn't buy it. The opening scenes of idyllic Las Vegas were so sugary sweet, I moaned. The continual barrage of outsiders encouraging Harriet to be a good parent made me groan. While Whoopi Goldberg turned in a fine performance as Harriet, and Depardieu was a believable Bogus, the character of Albert seemed flat.

Movies like this rely a lot on the kid. If the kid delivers a realistic portrayal, it can raise the film above its worth. It was clear that Haley Joel Osment worked hard on this movie and he does well, but not well enough to make the film shine. He's rubber-ducky cute, and it seems the movie leans too much on this to generate sympathy.

Besides, the script is pretty darn goofy, making a near impossible battle for the actors. For example, at Lorraine's funeral, Albert reads a paper from school as his mother's friends weep. They encourage him to finish the paper, but he says, "It's making everyone sad. My Mom wasn't sad. My Mom was never sad!!" And he runs across the cemetery on his little legs, the mourners scrambling and calling after him. <ugh>

If you think you've seen Haley Joel Osment before, it might be from TV on "Thunder Alley" or "The Jeff Foxworthy Show." But a lot of people saw him in FORREST GUMP. He played Forrest and Jenny's little boy. Poor kid. He lost his mother in that picture, too.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of BOGUS was seeing Newark, New Jersey on the big screen. The last movie I saw set in Newark was JOHNNY MNEMONIC, in which Newark was identifiable in only one or two establishing shots -- the rest were mattes and backlots. BOGUS is *really* set in Newark. Harriet lives on Barrow Street and gets stuck crossing the Jackson Street Bridge (BTW, that bridge is never out as frequently as the movie makes it seem). Her office is located along the Passaic River. Albert and Bogus poke around the construction site of the new Performing Arts Center and play in Branchbrook Park. Forgive me for the digression, but I live in New Jersey and grew up one town north of Newark. These locations are virtually my backyard. It's cool.

And while we're on the subject of Newark, why is it a given that Albert will hate it? I mean, c'mon, the kid's from *Las Vegas*. I don't think either city has a claim to being paradise on earth. <sigh> It's probably a simple matter of being true to your home town. But, hey, I think it's weird that the same gigawatt eyesores beneath which Nicholas Cage drank himself to death in LEAVING LAS VEGAS are revered as icons of the hearth by Albert.

In the "interesting notes on the supporting cast" department: singer Ute Lemper has a part as Babette, the magician's assistant. Last time I saw her, she played Albertine, the massively pregnant supermodel in READY TO WEAR (PRET-A-PORTER).

As BOGUS progressed, different things carried me through it. First it was Nancy Travis's looks, then location spotting in Newark plus the occasional joke and, finally, indifference. Yet despite the indifference, I found myself getting misty-eyed in a couple of scenes. Some were just run-of-the-mill tear-jerking, but others had real emotional kick thanks to the talents of Whoopi Goldberg. BOGUS does contains some genuine laughs -- when it tries to be funny, it usually is. So maybe there's something there for an audience that can look beyond the shortcomings. That audience might be children (BOGUS is rated PG).

Look, the title is such a sitting duck, I can't bring myself to close with a parting shot at it. I'll leave that to _your_ imagination.

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