'Book of Henry' a misguided mish-mash of family drama, vigilante thriller

There's genre-bending, and then there's genre breaking.

Director Colin Trevorrow made a modest splash with his 2012 theatrical feature debut, "Safety Not Guaranteed," an entertainingly quirky time-travel rom-com. After a foray into more straightforward stuff, with 2015's "Jurassic World," the cinematic mad scientist has returned to the laboratory with "The Book of Henry," a movie so mystifyingly misbegotten that it makes Frankenstein - the monster, not the movie - seem unremarkable.

It's the filmmaking equivalent of a monkey with the head of a goat, the tail of a fish, wings and teeny-tiny rat claws.

Working from a screenplay by Gregg Hurwitz, Trevorrow starts off well enough with "Henry," whose title character, played by "Midnight Special's" otherworldly Jaeden Lieberher, is an 11-year-old prodigy who runs his family's finances while scribbling furiously in notebooks, haunting libraries, snapping Polaroids, talking on payphones and leaving audio notes to himself on a microcassette recorder. If there wasn't a scene where someone can be seen using a smartphone, you'd swear the movie was set some time last century.

Our out-of-time little hero, whose intellect seems to encompass all of human knowledge, is also a compassionate soul, obsessing over the well-being of his next-door neighbor Christina (Maddie Ziegler), a flinch-y introvert who lives alone with her creepy widower stepfather - the aptly named Glenn Sickleman (Dean Norris), who also happens to be the town's police commissioner.

This seemingly throwaway detail will come to loom large later on, along with the fact that a relative of Glenn's (Philip Smreck) is the head of Child Protective Services.

Initially, the film doesn't do much with the ominous, if nebulous, implications of the Sicklemans' family dynamic, preferring to focus instead on the gently wacky comic potential of Henry's family, which includes a cute little brother (Jacob Tremblay) and their kooky single mom, Susan (Naomi Watts). Susan, a waitress and aspiring children's book author, is such a caricature of role reversal that she wastes her evenings playing violent videogames while Henry balances the checkbook.

Only gradually does "Henry," which early on registers as a solid if formulaic family dramedy, start to give way to something - or, rather, several somethings - that simply do not add up to a functioning whole. Waiting around the next plot turn are: a weepy medical melodrama; an uplifting romantic storyline involving Susan and a Doctor McDreamy character (Lee Pace); and, ultimately, a vigilante thriller so tonally inappropriate and out of left field that it seems spliced onto this movie from a completely different one.

"Henry" is well cast, with unforced and (mostly) relatable performances. But this chimera-like mish-mash of a movie ultimately cannot survive its many cross-purposes.