X
- 2001
- PG-13
- Universal Pictures
- 2 h
- 2001
- PG-13
- Universal Pictures
- 2 h
Summary A psychiatrist (Bridges) is baffled by a mysterious patient (Spacey) at a mental hospital who claims to be from a distant planet called K-PAX.
Directed By: Iain Softley
Written By: Gene Brewer, Charles Leavitt
- 2001
- PG-13
- Universal Pictures
- 2 h
- 2001
- PG-13
- Universal Pictures
- 2 h
K-PAX
49
7.4
Where to Watch
Summary A psychiatrist (Bridges) is baffled by a mysterious patient (Spacey) at a mental hospital who claims to be from a distant planet called K-PAX.
Directed By: Iain Softley
Written By: Gene Brewer, Charles Leavitt
Where to Watch
Top Cast
Metascore
Mixed or average
Based on 31 Critic Reviews
49
35% Positive
11 Reviews
11 Reviews
45% Mixed
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
19% Negative
6 Reviews
6 Reviews
Metascore
Mixed or average
Based on 31 Critic Reviews
49
35% Positive
11 Reviews
11 Reviews
45% Mixed
14 Reviews
14 Reviews
19% Negative
6 Reviews
6 Reviews
What keeps the movie going, besides Softley's intelligent direction and Mathieson's inventive cinematography, is the actors' duet between Spacey and Bridges.
Primarily, it's a warm, fuzzy and funny duet between Spacey and Bridges, one that brings to mind the interplay between Spock and Kirk.
User Score
Generally favorable
Based on 149 User Ratings
7.4
76% Positive
113 Ratings
113 Ratings
15% Mixed
23 Ratings
23 Ratings
9% Negative
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
User Score
Generally favorable
Based on 149 User Ratings
7.4
76% Positive
113 Ratings
113 Ratings
15% Mixed
23 Ratings
23 Ratings
9% Negative
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
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Both consoling and confounding.
Frustratingly fritters away what fascination it develops and bows to the basic conventions of a standard detective story mixed with the theme of a physician healing himself.
A two-time Oscar winner playing a crazy person in a big studio film released in late October. Can't you just smell the pretension? Probably not, given the other ways in which this film stinks.
Manipulative, feel-good drivel wrapped around a cloying performance by Kevin Spacey.
In short, this movie is exactly the kind of starry-eyed escapist fantasy that Dr. Powell suspects Prot of having. It's harmless enough, since we can be cured just by leaving the theater.
Prot's signature sunglasses are actually a favorite pair owned and worn by U2's frontman, Bono. The glasses are Brand DITA and style is discontinued. Kevin Spacey asked to borrow them for the film, which Bono agreed to under the condition that they were well cared for and were returned immediately upon completion of the film.
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It's not a masterpiece, but its lighted subtle criticism over our nowadays frantic society based on consumption and production, giving pause and importance to humanitarianism by rolling the family as the Aristotelian representation of The nuclear cell of A social structure, makes worth the time spent watching it. If, the art of films represents the inner reflection of a positive potential changing of our own lives and attitude towards it: to live in community highlighting the paradigm person versus object. If not, just a neo-formula of spicing movies with philosophical powder as the new wave of profiting from the ideological needs of the audience like pills to evade from the modern urban depression reflecting a society hunger of rational values.
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A very well-thought out movie that unfortunately offers very little kick. Still, the saving grace here is Kevin Spacey, who as always churns out a performance worth remembering.
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In "K-Pax," Kevin Spacey plays a character — either a profoundly disturbed mental patient or a being from a distant galaxy — who regards the strivings of ordinary earth folk with an amused detachment that combines smug superiority and gentle pity. So what else, you may well ask, is new? Mr. Spacey's gift for irony, his attraction to roles that hide emotional distress behind a cloak of knowing composure, is starting to look like a vice.
Here, as in last year's vile "Pay It Forward," he lends his keen intelligence to a dubious **** cause. "K-Pax" is a draggy, earnest exercise in pseudo-spiritual uplift, recycling romantic hokum about extraterrestrial life and mental illness with wide-eyed sincerity.
Mr. Spacey, his eyes obscured by black sunglasses, materializes in the middle of Grand Central Terminal one morning. You know that he is no ordinary commuter because of the New Age music that heralds his arrival and because a panhandler intuits something special about him. "Brother came from nowhere, you know what I'm saying?" he tells the police officer who arrives to take the stranger to the bughouse.
Once there, he explains to his doctor that he is a visitor from the planet K-Pax named Prot (rhymes with "emote") and that he traveled to earth on a beam of light. Although he could presumably leave the hospital at will (and does vanish for a few days on a tour of the Arctic), Prot elects to stay, and he promptly sets about curing the other patients. When Dr. Powell (Jeff Bridges) objects, Prot muses on the "curious human distinction" between doctor and patient and wonders why Powell hasn't cured his unhappy charges yet. In the movies, of course, the patients always cure each other. If Jack Nicholson and Winona Ryder can do it, why can't Mr. Spacey?
As Prot goes about dispensing his good works, the movie's central conundrum begins to emerge. Dr. Powell's skepticism is rattled by his patient's peculiar metabolism and a grasp of celestial mechanics that astounds a panel of leading astrophysicists, who assemble in the Rose Center planetarium for an impromptu seminar. Meanwhile, the physician clearly needs to heal himself. Powell is a classic movie workaholic, neglecting his wife and daughters and estranged from his grown son.
Needless to say, it takes a brother from a planet where family ties don't exist, a superior being with deep insights into the benighted state of humanity, to teach the good doctor some important lessons. Along the way, we pause for some excruciatingly predictable dialogue:
"You're too close to this patient," says Powell's supervisor (Alfre Woodard). "Why choose this one to save?"
"Maybe because I feel that he chose me," the doctor replies.
The K-Paxian civilization has evolved far beyond our own, so what do these beings have to teach us? "Get it right this time. This time is all you have." Can they send us some screenwriters, or are the ones we have aliens in human form?
Of course, there is also the possibility that Prot is just a severely deluded, terribly traumatized earthling, and the one thing "K-Pax" does get right is its handling of this ambiguity. Though the individual scenes are atrociously written — and dragged out so that every possible emotional cliché can be ticked off the checklist — the story is cleverly structured and allows us to entertain two contradictory possibilities without seeming egregiously illogical.
There are some lapses, though. Prot finds the expression "take a seat" incomprehensible and the New Jersey city of Hoboken difficult to pronounce, yet he seems well acquainted with American cinema. "Don't worry, doctor," he says to Powell, "I won't jump out of your chest."
But his divided identity does allow Mr. Spacey to jump out of his skin, to break through his sly reserve in a moment of wailing, screaming anguish tailor-made for the video screens on Oscar night. Mr. Bridges looks on with evident concern, and it's hard to watch these two actors plow through the nonsense of "K- Pax" without feeling that a terrific opportunity has been squandered. Mr. Spacey uses his quick verbal intelligence and his easy smirk to deflect emotion and then, in unexpected and often untrustworthy ways, to reveal it. Mr. Bridges's cunning works in the opposite direction. His plain-spoken naturalism is often an especially effective form of guile. If Mr. Spacey's characters are often more sincere than they seem, those of Mr. Bridges are smarter than they let on.
Unfortunately, the premise of "K- Pax" is so tired, and the direction so plodding and uninflected, that the actors rarely connect with each other. Iain Softley, the director, whose adaptation of "The Wings of the Dove" shook loose some of the novel's mannerisms and excavated its gothic psychosexual subtext, almost succeeds in giving some resonance to Charles Leavitt's relentlessly shallow script (from a novel by Gene Brewer).
Report
Production Company
IMF Internationale Medien und Film GmbH & Co. 2. Produktions KG,
Intermedia Films,
Lawrence Gordon Productions,
Pathé Pictures International
Release Date Oct 26, 2001
Duration 2 h
Rating PG-13
Tagline Is he crazy?...or is he light years ahead of us?
Website
http://www.k-pax.com/
Awards
Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films, USA
• 1 Nomination
Image Awards (NAACP)
• 1 Nomination
Golden Schmoes Awards
• 1 Nomination
