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Now Showing

THE MONKEY

Producers: James Wan, Dave Caplan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Chris Ferguson  Director: Osgood Perkins  Screenplay: Osgood Perkins   Cast: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, Sarah Levy, Adam Scott, Elijah Wood, Tess Degenstein, Danica Dreyer, Laura Mennell, Zia Newton, Nicco Del Rio, Janet Kidder, Kingston Chan and Shafin Karim   Distributor: Neon

Grade: C-

Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs” was an unexpected smash despite its insultingly dumb final explanation for the creepy goings-on it had so artfully deployed.  Perhaps aware of that flaw, in “The Monkey” the writer-director doesn’t bother offering any rationale for the powers wielded by the menacing titular creature at all.

Of course that’s a trait it shares with Stephen King’s 1980 short story (reappearing in revised form in his 1985 collection “Skeleton Crew”), which Perkins has substantially expanded in his script.  Like the story, the movie is basically just a demon doll tale, except that the doll is an old-fashioned mechanical toy, a monkey that beats a drum rather than clanging the usual cymbals (as in King) or swinging on an overhead pole.  It differs, though, by becoming a parade of gross-out death sequences, intended presumably as a snarky spoof of that increasingly commonplace horror-movie phenomenon but unhappily neither funny nor scary.  Osgood’s death scenes are rather like the campy ones you’d expect in an installment of “Tales from the Crypt” or “Creepshow”—pretty boring stuff, however complicated. 

We first meet the malevolent critter when blood-soaked Pete Shelburn (Adam Scott in a game cameo) tries to dispose of it at an antique shop and it springs into action, baring its fearsome teeth and banging on its little drum; on the final beat a gruesome fate of Rube Goldberg complexity befalls the storekeeper (Shafin Karim).

So much for Pete, who, some years later, is revealed to have abandoned his family, leaving twin sons Bill and Hal (both played, in nicely differentiated performances, by Christian Convery) to be raised by their mom Lois (Tatiana Maslany). Bill’s a nasty bully and wimpy Hal his favorite target.  While rummaging through their dad’s closet one day they come upon the monkey, and unwittingly cause the decapitation of their babysitter Annie (Danica Dreyer) by turning the key.

Hal, fed up with Bill’s abuse, decides to try using the monkey to kill his brother, but instead it causes Lois to die of a bloody aneurysm.  The distraught boy chops the toy up with a hatchet, but it reassembles and appears at the Maine home of their Uncle Chip (Perkins) and Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), who have taken the orphaned boys in.  Bill winds the toy up again in an attempt to kill Hal, whom he blames for Lois’ death, but instead Chip is crushed into mush in a stampede while out hunting.  The chastened boys put the toy in to a box and toss it down a deep well.

A quarter century later Bill and Hal are totally estranged.  Shy Hal (Theo James), working at a hardware store under perpetually zonked-out manager Swayne (Zia Newton), goes off for his once-a-year reunion with his adolescent son Petey (Colin O’Brien), only to be informed that his ex-wife (Laura Mennell) intends to have her egomaniacal guru husband (Elijah Wood) adopt the boy, severing Hal’s ties to him.  So father and embittered son go off on what could be their last weeklong session.

It does not go well, because deaths intervene—a woman at a motel where they stay, and then Aunt Ida in a grisly accident involving her husband’s fishing lures, a kitchen blaze and a lawn post.  Bill calls out of the blue, demanding that Hal go to Ida’s place to settle her affairs; but the visit is interrupted by an apparently accidental shotgun blast that that dispatches Barbara (Tess Degenstein), a chirpy real estate agent.  It turns out that hers is only the latest in the locality’s growing death toll.

That’s because Bill (also played by James), a raving lunatic, had searched out and acquired the monkey using a zonked-out doofus named Ricky (Rohan Campbell) as his go-between.  He’s been turning the key of doom in an attempt to kill Hal, accepting whatever demises occur—including, for some reason, Swayne—as collateral damage.  Inexplicably Ricky has grown possessive of the monkey himself—it reminds him of his absentee father—and drags Hal and Petey to Bill’s lair, where he dies gruesomely while father and son enter a standoff with brother/uncle. 

But that’s not the end of it.  Bill goes berserk with the toy, leading to an apocalyptic explosion of carnage in which even the Book of Revelation’s Rider on a Pale Horse trots menacingly by—a CGI apparition that’s as chintzy as the death sequences.  (King, by contrast, contented himself with some dead fish.)  What’s to follow?  Perkins doesn’t say.

“The Monkey” strives, with sweaty desperation, to simultaneously generate screams and laughs, but it succeeds mostly in eliciting groans.  It is, to be sure, a visually stylish piece of work.  Perkins is expert in staging scenes, and with the assistance of production designer Danny Vermette, costumer Mica Kayde and cinematographer Nico Aguilar, the individual images are exceptionally well composed.  On the other hand, the pacing is bumpy—editors Greg Ng and Graham Fortin are stymied by the episodic nature of the script—and Edo Van Breeman’s music relies far too heavily on  the big crash of sound to alert us to the gotcha moments.

The cast are a variable bunch.  The youngsters—first Convery, and then O’Brien—surprisingly come off best.  But James seems flummoxed by Perkins’ expectation that he provide some serious emotional depth to Hal as a father trying to connect with his estranged son while going wildly zonkers as the unhinged Bill.  As to the supporting cast, all appear to be playing their parts in italics, making for a succession of cartoon figures—Wood, Newton and Degenstein are worst in that respect, but the others aren’t far behind.  And as for Campbell, the less said the better; Ricky’s a pointless character in any event, and the actor seems at a total loss how to play him. 

But what can be expected when the dialogue is of a sort that seems to have “air quotes” around every line, and the gags are so lame (what’s the point of the pom-pom carrying cheerleaders who show up to do their routine at the site of recent deaths—except to allow for a grisly end topper?).  Even a potentially amusing scene, of a flustered priest (Nicco Del Rio) delivering a eulogy at a funeral falls flat when he concludes, “It is what it is.”   (Just compare Peter Cook’s turn in “The Princess Bride” to see how it should be done.)

Perkins is not an untalented fellow.  But in “The Monkey” he’s beating out a crude, monotonous tune.                    

Now Showing

MICKEY 17

Producers: Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Bong Joon Ho, Dooho Choi  Director: Bong Joon Ho   Screenplay: Bong Joon Ho   Cast: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, Mark Ruffalo, Anamaria Vartolomei, Daniel Henshall, Cameron Britton, Patsy Ferran, Michael Monroe, Tim Key, Lloyd Hutchinson, Stephen Park, Angus Imrie, Ian Hanmore, Ellen Robertson and Haydn Gwynne   Distributor: Warner Bros.

Grade: D

For those who’d like to see Robert Pattinson killed on screen—Edward Cullen haters, you know who you are—Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning “Parasite” will be a joy: he dies over and over in very unpleasant ways. And suffers woefully in the process.  The movie dies too, with agonizing slowness.  Ponderous and pretentious, “Mickey 17” is a dull, insufferably smug sci-fi parable about class division, colonialism, political cultism, cloning, speciocide and religious mania, all in one package.  It’s also supposed to be funny.    

Based on the 2022 novel “Mickey7” by Edward Ashton but adding to the number of iterations in the existence of Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes, the plot is set in a dystopian future when great masses are attempting to flee earth for other planets.  Among them are two hapless guys, sad-sack, dim-bulb Mickey and his smarter but shifty pal Timo (Steven Yeun), who are in debt to Darius Blank (Ian Hanmore), a murderous loan shark.  Both manage to get spots on a spacecraft headed for Niflheim, where failed politician and quasi-religious cult leader Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his shrewish, manipulative wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) intend to establish a colony befitting their ideas of purity and self-glorification—and the dominance of a privileged elite over the hoodwinked masses.  Timo lies about his expertise to secure a cushy job as a pilot, but Mickey is not so lucky.  Signing the application without bothering to read it, he volunteers to be an Expendable, not understanding what that entails.  He’s gleefully accepted.

That’s because the Expendable is the guy who must accept every dangerous assignment, from being tested with potentially fatal concoctions formulated by the science team headed by Dr. Arkady (Cameron Britton) to undertaking every probably lethal task.  If he dies, it’s fine, because he can be “reprinted” by a machine from waste matter, the duplicate then implanted with his electronically stored bank of memories.  (The procedure is forbidden on earth, but Marshall had secured dispensation for him to use it in space.)  By the time the plot kicks in four years after liftoff, Mickey’s in his seventeenth version, which seems about to end since he’s fallen into a deep crevice on icebound Niflheim and Timo, passing by, notes that it would be a waste of his time to attempt a rescue.

But he survives unexpectedly when a band of slug-like critters the humans call Creepers drag him off and, rather than devouring him, spit him out on the tundra.  Annoyed by being dismissed as unfit to consume, he makes his way back to the compound, where for some reason the beautiful—and formidable—Nasha (Naomi Ackie) has chosen the schmo as her preferred squeeze.  But to his distress he finds that since he was presumed deceased, a Mickey 18 has been created to replace him.  And presumably because an inept lab assistant had stumblingly unplugged the regenerator in mid-process, Mickey 18 emerged with a more aggressive, indeed rebellious personality.

What follows is a turgid farrago in which the two Mickeys vie both for survival—since “multiples,” as they’re called, are viewed as an abomination subject to immediate (and permanent) execution, which explains why Mickey 18 wants to off his inconvenient predecessor—and for Nasha.  There’s a further complication in Kai (Anamaria Vartolomei), the death of whose girlfriend (Ellen Robertson) Mickey 17 had inadvertently caused. She’s now looking for either revenge or a new source of sexual satisfaction.

All of this is lumped into the larger plot of Marshall’s megalomaniacal ambitions, which, under the influence of Ylfa and his religious advisor Preston (Daniel Henshall)—who must not be confused with his spokesman (Tim Key), the fellow dressed for some reason in a pigeon costume—come to center on the genocidal extermination of the Creepers, a species that turns out to be far from the unintelligent bugs they’re assumed to be, and incredibly numerous.  The big finale combines crazy Ken’s campaign against them with the imminent execution of the two Mickeys, as well as a baby Creeper and  their defender Nasha. 

The cast commits to all Bong’s preachy nonsense with a zeal it hardly merits.  Pattinson comes off best; he differentiates ably between Mickey 17, who’s like a wimpy silent screen comic except for the fact that he emits a whiny, strangulated voice, and Mickey 18, who’s sneeringly pugnacious.  But it’s hardly a dual role that calls for any subtlety, and he provides none.  Neither does Yeun, who’s as blatantly sleazy here as he was sympathetic in “Minari.”  Ackie more than adequately embodies Nasha’s forceful self-confidence, the very opposite of Mickey 17’s mousiness. 

The nadir of the acting certainly comes in the performances of Swinton and Ruffalo.  She mugs as ferociously as she’s ever done—which is saying quite a lot.  But he outdoes himself.  Wearing false front teeth that push his upper lip out in a fashion that makes you fear he might bite his tongue off shouting Marshall’s maniacal lines, he’s bad enough in the first two acts, when he sports a fluffy hairdo.  But when in the third he slicks back the locks and, jutting out his chin, looks like a grotesque version of Marlon Brando, he goes beyond bad to unmentionable.  It’s a turn worthy of Razzie consideration.

“Mickey 17” is a fairly expensive film, but apart from the Creeper effects from the VFX team supervised by Dan Glass, it doesn’t look particularly impressive.  One can admire an early shot of desperate applicants for a shot at space travel trooping along the spiral walkway of an airport, but nothing that follows equals it, and overall Fiona Crombie’s production design and Catherine George’s costumes are just okay.  Darius Khondji’s cinematography is oppressively murky and claustrophobic, while Yang Jinmo’s editing feels sluggish; together they make rather a hash of the big finale, and a nightmarish insert at the close is one of Bong’s most misguided contrivances.  Jung Jaeil’s score often goes silent, which is fine since when it opens up, it proves unmemorable.

Admirers of Bong’s earlier films will probably expend a great deal of effort trying to find something nice to say about “Mickey 17,” but as with “Okja,” which was a similarly bloated mélange of half-baked ideas told on a grand scale, that will be a tough sell.  Fortunately, his other half-dozen films offer plenty of proof of what his eccentric talent can achieve. 

As for Warner Bros., this costly fiasco could very well be the 2025 equivalent of “Joker: Folie à Deux.”