This movie’s been out for almost a month but Labor Day provided a good opportunity for me to catch up on all the ones that slipped through the cracks over the summer. I really wasn’t going to see “Apes” but it has become such a sleeper hit that I would be almost derelict in a way I wouldn’t be if I chose to skip, say, Fright Night or Conan the Barbarian or My Idiot Brother or any of the other bombs released over the last two weekends.
What Works: The interesting thing about this movie is that it’s really three movies. The first third is a genial, fairly family friendly movie about James Franco’s scientist raising a really smart ape. The second third (and the one that felt most different) was a sort of primate version of Shawshank Redemption where Caesar the civilized monkey has to learn the ropes of a primate prison, and begins to run it his way. And the last, most conventional third is where the apes run wild on the streets of San Francisco. The second most interesting thing about this movie is that I actually felt more for the monkeys than I did the humans. Andy Serkis as Caesar delivers his best motion capture performance to date and I was shocked at much I rooted for him over the humans.
What Doesn’t Work: Freida Pinto is gorgeous, but if she has anything to show as an actress, she might want to show it in her next couple movies. Too often I feel like I’m watching the model in a shampoo commercial try to become an actress. Her and Franco make a sweet, if bland, pair but their romance is the only thing that humanizes the actual human characters. Also, this movie’s dialogue sucks and the human characters (including the painfully one-note corporate bad guy) will have you rooting for the apes. The kid that played Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies particularly sucks.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Either made the human characters more well-rounded or not spent as much time with them. Also, there’s a last-minute virus introduced in the movie that feels thrown in for potential sequels more than really fits into the whole of this movie (it even plays out over the end credits). There’s already a lot going on in the last minute–it looks like a rival, more evil ape named Koba will fight Caesar for power in the sequel–to set up a sequel, and the addition of a virus makes the ending feel overcrowded.