K-PAX

A feel-good movie startlingly bereft of emotion: The trippy Sheryl Crow song, played over the end credits, is more moving than anything before it. This offering from director Iain Softley wants us to ask whether mental patient "Prot" (Kevin Spacey, in a role that would normally be reserved for Robin Williams) is, as he convincingly claims, an alien being from the titular planet that sounds more like a West Coast radio station. But after using that mystery as the film's central device, Softley maddeningly refuses to solve it; he wants to have his cake and eat it, too. As the psychiatrist assigned to the case, former Starman Jeff Bridges goes through the motions of being a typical movie dad-husband, which is to say he works hard, and his family hates him for doing so. Or maybe they just dislike the fact that he brings dangerous mental patients along to family barbecues. A haggard David Patrick Kelly (The Warriors) leads the cast of nutballs who don't respond to therapy but are healed almost instantly by Prot. K-PAX isn't quite as offensive as it sounds, nor is it in any way rousing; Spacey and Bridges are watchable, but nothing more.