Some movies ask you to leave your brain at the door , some movies ask you to believe in the impossible to really have a good time. Playing God asks just one simple , eensy , teensy thing so it can fully entertain you , it's accomplished in just four easy to follow steps: crack open your skull , scoop out your brain , squish it under your foot several times and reverse steps two and one. Congratulations , you now have all the necessary requirements to fully enjoy a whole lot of nothing.
Some movies fail at the box office but you manage to see why the producers thought it could have been a good movie , others are simply good ideas that are badly executed. Then there's Playing God , which enters the esteemed category of movies which seem to have grown from the union of a drunk director , actors satisfied in the knowledge that this horrible flick will have no lasting impact on their careers and a bunch of rip-offs ( or homages as they like to call it ) from other , better movies that end up looking like an unflushed toilet.
Harsh? Maybe. Justified? Hell yes!
This is a movie that is not just satisfied in ripping off other movies but feels the need to remind us of that fact every ten minutes. For example , a gunman bursts into a garden with the two guns in his hands firing away. This does look moderately kool , but the camera lingers on the actor for so long you can almost hear the director yelling: "Oooh , look look! John Woo! Two guns blazing! Slooooow motion!"
And if that wasn't enough , you can also hear the script grunting under the effort it must take to try and make every single line of dialogue sound like something deep and meaningful like in a Tarantino movie. Poor Timothy Hutton gets to deliver most of the corny lines , you have to admire the effort he puts into it , this guy deserves better.
Unlike most movies this one does not suffer from "stupid bad guy" syndrome , just to make things a little different this time we get stupid heroes. Example: Duchovny manages to distract a bad guy by making him go into the bathroom to get some bandages. Now the bad guy is , like , stoned , man , so he leaves his shotgun next to our hero. ( term used as loosely as possible )
Survival instincts and a good dose of common sense seems to suggest grabbing the shotgun , which our hero does , but only after contemplating it for about thirty seconds. Even when he does grab it he seems unsure how to hold it , going so far as to actually wonder if he should place a finger near the trigger. Mind you , I've never fired a shotgun in my life but believe you me that the bad guy would be missing most of his vital organs , be he stoned or not.
Some will argue that our hero does not have a killer instinct , the hell with that! Two FBI guys have just been shot in front me , along with one bad guy and the other looks like he might go ballistic at any second. Solution? BOOM! I'll take the time to feel sorry about it later thank you very much.
Another prime example of the idiot hero syndrome:
Our boy Duchovny needs to reach his girl before something bad happens to her. He knows the head bad guy has her on the tenth floor of a building and that he might be running into a room full of people with itchy trigger fingers. He still has his shotgun , bring it along you say? No thanks , I'll just ditch it in the back of my car. And the real kicker is this: when he reaches the room and people start shooting at him he has the nerve to look surprised!
While we are on the subject of getting shot , why in hades were those FBI guys sitting with their backs to the door? I've got no formal training but even I know you never sit with your back to the door. Ask Mr. Wild Bill , the first and only time he did not sit with his back to a wall cost him his life. This is the major problem with this movie , any mook could have thought of a hundred ways to make it better. Is it so much to ask that Hollywood actually put a little common sense into their characters?
For instance:
Our heroes hide at Duchovny's summer home , now the bad guys could come knocking at any moment. Ok , this time our hero does get himself a gun and has it at his side most of the time. But see , our hero is a drug addict and guess what? He chooses now to go clean and suffer through DT. Oh sure , he'll be really impressive when the bad guys come calling. Going clean is really honorable of him , but I would have waited until I did not need to be conscious or being able to fire a gun.
Rating: 1 out of 5 for an enjoyable performance by Timothy Hutton , plot holes the size of Godzilla , getting our intelligence insulted and several "oh come on!" moments.
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