Monkey business
Several months before the release of Final Destination: Bloodlines, James Wan beats New Line to the punch by producing The Monkey. Indeed, the titular monkey possesses the power, once the mechanism is triggered, to cause an accident that wipes out a nearby person. As evidenced by the very amusing opening scene, the film’s main draw will be the deaths that pepper it, as numerous as they are cartoonish.
Chase accidents, stove-top mishaps, harpoon misfires and a host of others lie at the heart of this entertaining lineup, which spares no grand-guignol gore — sometimes truly over-the-top (the sleeping-bag gag) — and above all remains consistently generous (every possible excuse to blow people up in a geyser of viscera). Contrary to expectations, The Monkey is indeed a comedy, pushing Perkins to drop his sometimes needlessly cryptic style. While he still threads rhythmic counterpoints through the editing, it finally cuts to the chase.
However, it doesn’t merely connect the gore-filled vignettes loosely, as in the Final Destination saga. For while he has streamlined his direction, the director has not shed his bizarre atmospheres, where the characters are just quirky enough to generate a creeping unease. Casting choices, starting with the unlikely use of the clean-cut Theo James, along with the art direction and, of course, these deliberately mind-bending lines of dialogue, all contribute to the construction of a parallel reality.
Death is the killer
A particularly macabre parallel reality, where the local cheerleaders cheer on the medical examiners and where supporting characters seem almost aware of their status as cannon fodder. This morbid absurdity is both the film’s great strength and the source of some of its weaknesses. On the one hand, it gives the movie a cynically distinctive tone within the realm of dark comedy, sometimes edging into Coen-like territory. On the other hand, as the stakes rise thanks to a twist, the film loses a bit of momentum.
Its true hero, in the end, is this monkey with a pretty killer mug, which could’ve come with cymbals if the design hadn’t been kept under Disney’s guard since Toy Story (true fact!). More than just a gimmick, as mainstream productions love, it’s the embodiment of a reaper who doesn’t lack morbid irony. “Everything happens by accident,” repeats the resigned hero to his son, a line that pretty accurately captures the unpredictability of death pushed to its comic extremes here. So burials become semi-improvised rituals by a trainee priest.
The Monkey doesn’t lack flaws (some CGI is painful to look at), but it deserves credit for exploring a distinctive morbid humor, conveyed with a certain poetry in the final scene. For those who enjoy joking about death, whether in the Coen brothers’ work or in Franquin’s Black Ideas, this strange entertainment should provoke some outright laughs. At least, that was our experience.
