Kevin Kline: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

3. Dave Kovic/Bill Mitchell - Dave (1993)

Throughout Kline's career he's had both success and failure playing both the buffoon and the aristocrat, but only in Ivan Reitman's comedy Dave does he have the opportunity to play both simultaneously. Unlike some other movies in Kline's filmography, Dave does not attempt to pass itself off as anything but a highly unrealistic comedy. The plot - President Bill Mitchell (sophisticated Kline) falls ill and is replaced by hapless lookalike Dave Kovic (slob Kline) - is both ridiculous and overdone in the world of cinema (see Kagemusha, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Prisoner of Zenda, among others). Dave has all the cliche elements of an early 1990s feel-good comedy, but when that montage kicks in - yes, montage - the fact is that you actually do feel pretty damn good. Dave is having a blast playing Prez, Kline is having a blast playing Dave, and despite the whole been-there-done-that premise, you might find yourself having a blast watching it all over again. This is the kind of role that would be easy to overact, perhaps making Dave into more of a slob or the President into more of a gentleman in order to highlight the differences between the two. But there is much more subtlety in Kline's performance(s), and his apparent effortlessness as an actor is what keeps the film from slipping into the abyss with all of those other feel-good '90s flicks. Instead, you get the sense that all of those cliches were actually riffing off Dave rather than the other way around, and if that's not high praise for an actor's ability to make the same old thing feel fresh again then I don't know what is.