Clearly created as a star vehicle for David Duchovny this Pulp Fiction wannabe seems to have taken too many trips to the test screening room before being released. Whether it’s trying to be menacing, sexy or humorous, the viewer is left at a loss as to how to react. The real problem is that it’s all been done before and generally much better. Trying to combine the witty dialogue and eccentric characters of Tarantino, the slow motion gunplay of John Woo and copious amounts of blood from both of them, Playing God rarely comes off as very clever or stylish. What we get is the blood but hardly a pulse to go along with it. First time feature Director Andy Wilson, better known for the British television series Cracker, tries his hand at quirky L.A.-cool, but he could have used a better script than the one provided by screenwriter Mark Haskell Smith.
Duchovny plays surgeon Eugene Sands, an overachieving good guy who has accidentally killed a patient while using amphetamines to stay awake. After having his medical license pulled, thereby losing his raison d’être, Sands sinks into a life of self-pitying heroin addiction. It’s in this state that he crosses paths with Raymond Blossom (hilariously unthreatening Timothy Hutton) and his beautiful girlfriend Claire (Angelina Jolie). Sands saves the life of one of Blossom’s henchmen who gets gunned down in a bar. Blossom, realizing the convenience of having a surgeon on call who doesn’t ask pesky questions, convinces Sands with the help of some cash and a Porsche, to fall in with him. What really pulls Sands in is the opportunity to operate again, although the attention of Blossom’s pouty moll Claire doesn’t hurt either. What follows is a lot of gunplay with bumbling Russian mobsters and incompetent FBI agents and nary a kiss between Eugene and Claire. What a disappointment.
