wildyams

Am I the only one who thinks that David Duchovny is from the Jonathan Frakes school of acting? Before I went to bed last night I caught about 5 minutes of Playing God (which I see is going for a whopping $3.99 used), and something occured to me as I was watching it: this movie would be great if Duchovny wasn't mugging for the camera the whole movie. Ok, maybe it wouldn't have been great, but it definitely would have been better. I remember seeing it in theaters when it came out and thinking it was pretty unimpressive, but for whatever reason it kinda stuck with me; and having seen it in bits and pieces on cable here and there over the last month or two it's kind of a fun little film (or as fun as a movie about psychopathic mob-type guys can be, anyway). Timothy Hutton did a good job as a charismatic bad guy, and Angelina Jolie was pretty good (as she tended to be in her early days before she was an A-list star) as the beautiful and mysterious sort of femme fatale. The story is mildly interesting at least: a former doctor who had his doctor's license taken away for being hooked on drugs and accidentally killing a patient while high (just like Charles Dance's character in Alien 3) catches the eye of an up-and-coming criminal that he gets entangled with while the FBI is on his case, and the case of the criminal he's entangled with. There's some fun characters in the movie, and there is an interesting climax with a somewhat interesting car chase, and all in all the movie is... well like I said it's kinda fun. But man, David Duchovny just can not seem to be serious at any point during the movie. He's not helped much by the fact that his character keeps doing voice overs about how uninterested he is by everything that is going on around him (like the FBI threatening to throw him in jail for more than a decade and guys with guns trying to kill him), but he's even goofing around as he's going through withdrawls from whatever drug he's hooked on. As I said earlier, it's eerily reminiscent of Jonathan Frakes' performance in Star Trek: First Contact, where the whole threat of being annihilated and/or having the entirety of human history unravel doesn't stop him from yucking it up and giggling at every opportunity (note: I never saw much of the show, and have heard that Frakes was always like this; but First Contact is really the only Trek thing with that crew that I ever really paid much attention to, so forgive me if pointing out this one performance is akin to a drop in a bucket). Anyway, the whole Playing God thing got me wondering if Duchovny had ever been good in anything. I know that X-Philes would almost surely said that Duchovny was great in that show, so I'll give them that; and I kinda liked him in Full Frontal (for the 2 minutes or so he was in it), but other than that I haven't seen really any performances by him that were all that impressive; and certainly none where he played anyone serious at all (that probably goes for X-Files as well). Maybe I'm just stating the obvious here, and am the last person to figure this out (like I was in finding out that the reason Mr. Deeds and The Hudsucker Proxy are so similar in storyline is because they were both sort-of remakes of the movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town). Oh well, I can't figure it all out, I'm going to bed.