Starman meets One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest meets New-Age nausea in K-Pax, a lame touchy-feely sci-fi drama that wastes the talents of Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. Directed by Iain Softley (The Wings Of The Dove), K-Pax is one of those films whose story telegraphs everything a good hour before it happens.

Kevin Spacey plays a mysterious man known only as Prot (rhymes with 'wrote') who claims to have come from K-Pax, a planet in a far away galaxy. When Prot comes to the aid of a mugging victim in Grand Central Station, he runs into a little bit of trouble with the police. Not only does he have no identification on him, he also begins to talk about how the Earth is too bright. New York's finest thank him for his help and keen observations with a free trip to a local public psychiatric hospital, where he comes under the care of Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges). Powell, it seems, has had a lot of experience with those who deem themselves "otherworldly".

As the two meet for regular sessions, Powell begins to notice that Prot is not your usual delusional. Not only does he seem very well balanced (aside from the alien bit), he also has a stunning knowledge of astronomy. So much so that he wows a group of top scientists that Powell brings him before. When Prot is not wowing the eggheads, he's playing messiah to the fellow patients of the hospital. He gets the silent one to talk, the one afraid of germs to come outside and take off his face mask, the person who never leaves her room to actually come out and interact and so on. This makes Dr. Powell begin to second-guess himself. Is Prot really an extraterrestrial? Is he really leaving for his home planet on July 27th like he says he is? Will he be able to help the doctor patch up his troubled family life?

After twenty minutes, will you really give a rat's ass?

To tell you the truth, I sure didn't. The fact that I had such animosity towards this film really made me angry. Here, you have two excellent actors being directed by a man who made The Wings Of The Dove one of the best dramas I had seen in years. A combination of these talents certainly and deservedly got my interests raised.

Where did it go wrong? A stinker of a script by Charles Leavitt (from a novel by Gene Brewer that I heard was a dog to begin with) is a good place to start laying the blame. If there is a cinematic cliché you can think of that deals with psychiatric patients or troubled family life, it's in here. None of it is fresh nor does it have any emotional conviction or payoff for the viewer.

Softley's work here can only be best described as lifeless. None of the grace and intelligence that accompanied Wings of The Dove can be found here (then again, Henry James wrote Dove. I have no clue as to whom Gene Brewer is.). Instead, we get a director just going through the motions, taking an eternity to wrap things up.

Kevin Spacey, role-wise, seems to be stuck in a New Age rut (Pay It Forward, anyone?). It's almost as if he's lost the edge he proudly had on display in his earlier work such as American Beauty, L.A. Confidential and Glengarry Glenn Ross. Lately, he seems to be in a daze, settling for characters such as Prot: a gentle-talking, laid-back individual that wants to give the world a big group hug. Somewhere in cinema heaven, Lester Burnham is throwing up profusely.

Bridges, who last year turned in a solid performance in an otherwise awful movie, The Contender, doesn't seem to have as much spark here either. He too seems to be on autopilot. Like Spacey, he just coasts along using as little effort as possible to get the job done. My advice to both of these fine actors is choose your projects a little more carefully next time.

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