K-PAX Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

K-PAX

K-PAX is one of these weird warm and fuzzy movies that ends up being just fuzzy. Maybe things would have turned out better if Robin Williams had been available for the role of Prot, here played by Kevin Spacey, who despite his name, just doesn't connect to the space-man wannabe or even might-be. Meanwhile, in a pleasant bit of irony, Jeff Bridges plays the other side of his Starman role. Along the way through this muddled enterprise, we get too many Hollywood clichés. You can predict what is going to happen when you cram overworked dads, over-devoted psychiatrists, and psychotics with hearts of gold who go around healing each other into one thin plot.

So, what is going on here? How about something along the lines of Rainman has some Close Encounters with E.T. in the Cuckoo’s Nest? Is Prot an earthling, a saint, a looney, an alien, or various other possibilities which the film’s advertising proposes to celebrate? Who knows? (You won’t.) Who cares? (I didn’t.)

It’s all a sort of New Age mess, with allegory here, not to mention you can imagine the kind of music there, and too much Kevin Spacey all over the place. He can become a very tiresome fixture, even when he is eating an unpeeled banana. (So much for the gossip magazines’ speculation about his private life.)

What can you say, except that K-PAX may go down in the annals of film as the best Robin Williams movie that Robin Williams never played in? This is one film that I felt that I really wasted my time watching, and I just don’t want to waste any more of my time writing about it, or expect you to waste any more of your time reading about it. Keep your feet dry (if they stick to the floor after this, its the sludge of this movie, not just the typical movie-house floor), and your heart full of noble thoughts, not of Kevin Spacey eating bananas.

You deserve more than this, but you do not deserve anymore about this film. Let me suggest you learn about Charles Fort, a late 19^th-early 20^th century collector of and commentator on weird phenomena, who probably would have loved to have met Prot, on his own terms. The weirdness of Fort can be seen in its lush originality in, of all places, the Online Sacred Text Archives, with two complete books, Book of the Damned and New Lands, which provide a few moments of more genuine amusement than amazement. The Sacred Texts editors dangle a quote that packs more paranoia into two sentences than X-Files gets into a whole season: "I think that we're fished for. It may be that we're highly esteemed by super-epicures somewhere."