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FILM  MOVIE REVIEW

Orlando Bloom pill-teases Michael Peña in The Good Doctor. [Photo: Tribeca Film Festival]

The Good Doctor *½

by Simon Abrams on April 23, 2011   Jump to Comments (1) or Add Your Own

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In spite of how rudderless The Good Doctor may initially seem, director Lance Daly has a strategy and a queasy logic guiding his half-baked scenario. His character study of a manic young doctor who becomes obsessed with a teenage patient makes a point of not judging its subject. But that doesn't mean that his antihero isn't very easy to judge. Daly's title character is an abominable character that viewers can only intermittently relate to, not because he's sympathetic but because he's just pathetic.

Dr. Martin Blake (Orlando Bloom) looks and typically acts like a shy, caring young man. He's young, good-looking, and desperate to please his boss, Dr. Waylon (Rob Morrow). He's also in over his head soon after he starts practicing, and because he's such a perfectly innocuous milquetoast, you want to like him more than you probably should. Until he starts using his knowledge of internal medicine to poison people. But don't let the fact that he's hurting people fool you: In his head, he thinks he's right, which, according to Daly, makes him an inherently interesting character. Daly confuses that internal conflict with emotional complexity, allowing viewers to check out instead of actively engaging with Blake's unstable behavior.

In spite of Daly and screenwriter John Enbom's earnest attempts at maintaining a numbering distance between Blake's thoughts and his actions, there's nothing but pseudo-complexity supporting The Good Doctor's psychodrama. He's acting on impulse and hence isn't motivated by anything more complex than greed and blind panic. In that sense, Daly found a perfect actor for Blake in Bloom, a fledgling actor who thinks of himself as a leading man but just doesn't have the range to support that ambition. The Good Doctor isn't a ponderous bore because Blake isn't a strictly good or bad character: It sucks because he isn't even a compelling character.

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• Director(s): Lance Daly
• Screenplay: John Enbom
• Cast: Orlando Bloom, Riley Keough, Michael Peña, Rob Morrow, J.K. Simmons
• Runtime: 85 min.
• Rating: NR
• Year: 2011

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