OxfordPress.com

Grade: C-

Verdict: These looney tunes from Kevin Spacey have been heard before.

Details: Starring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. Directed by Iain Softley. Rated PG-13 for language and violence. Two hours.

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Review: A rather nice cast has been assembled to watch Kevin Spacey do some showy stunt acting in “K-PAX.” Let's hope they were well paid.

Spacey plays a guy named Prot (pronounced Prote) who claims to be from the planet K-PAX. He eats bananas with the skins on. He says he can talk to golden retrievers. He wears sunglasses all the time because, he says, “I'd forgotten your planet is really bright.”

Not surprisingly, all this lands him in a New York mental hospital, where he's assigned to Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges), a kindly workaholic who needs to spend more time with his family. Powell initially thinks he's nutty as a fruitcake, but he's impressed by how detailed Prot's delusion is.

Powell is forced to take his patient more seriously when a panel of blue-ribbon astronomers is flummoxed by Prot's knowledge of the solar system (the “Good Will Hunting” moment.) Even so, Powell draws the line when Prot begins ministering to fellow psychos, giving them tasks like looking for the bluebird of happiness. We've seen these mental patients before, of course. They're the same lovable one-quirk loonies who wandered through “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” and “King of Hearts” and countless other movies built around the “Who's really mad here?” theme.

So, could Prot actually be from another planet or is he simply a very human man in very deep pain? And what is madness in a mad world? And what the heck is “Cuckoo's” Randle P. McMurphy doing these days anyway?

Ever since he won his best-actor Oscar for “American Beauty,” Spacey has seemed hellbent on showing us his warm 'n' cuddly side. First there was “Pay It Forward.” Now there's “K-PAX.” Spacey is such an incredible actor that you can watch him do just about anything. But it's painful to see him pandering to some perceived amplification of his on-screen persona. Certainly he's entertaining as Prot. But the work itself is limited and lazy and repetitive. How many times can we watch him do that head tilt perfected by Bridges when he played an alien in “Starman?”

Watching Bridges watch Spacey do Bridges is rather interesting. But it's about all he has to do besides play straightman to Spacey's spaceman, which mostly calls for 14 different variations on looking befuddled yet concerned. Still, he brings a welcome audience-surrogate presence to the movie, playing Powell as someone who really does want to cure Prot, but also can't entirely dismiss the notion that what he says may be true.

Director Iain Softley has made some excellent movies — “The Wings of the Dove” immediately comes to mind. But in “K-PAX,” he seems subject to Spacey's vanity production. He pretty much turns his camera on his star and lets things go at that.

Spacey probably is a warm 'n' cuddly guy. And “K-PAX” is probably going to be very popular. But he's also far better than this worn-out, warm 'n' cuddly movie.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)