Good King
You can’t really got wrong with demonic toys most of the time.
The monkey
Director: Osgood Perkins • Writer: Osgood Perkins, based on the story by Stephen King
Starring: Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien
Sinh • 1hr 38mins
Opens Hong Kong Mar 27 • III
Grade: B
Straight up, Osgood Perkins’s The Monkey is one of the better Stephen King adaptations to come down the pipe in quite some time, perhaps ever. For whatever reason, King is difficult to get “right” on screen; filmmakers and writers have had a hard time realising his unique mix of creeping dread, thick atmosphere, unadulterated terror and, yes, comedy in live action ever since Brian De Palma managed to nail it right out of the box in 1976 with Carrie. For every The Shining, The Dead Zone or It, there’s a Firestarter, Dreamcatcher or It Chapter Two. Even King has problems adapting King (Maximum Overdrive anyone?). But Perkins does a good job here, putting The Monkey in the top half of the King on Film canon.
Things start strong, with airline pilot Petey Shelburn (Adam Scott taking a day off Severance) trying to return a wind-up monkey toy to the antique dealer he bought it from. You know the kind: bangs on tin drum, constantly grinning, creepy AF. It all goes very, very sideways and Petey vanishes, leaving his wife Lois (Tatiana Maslany) to raise their twin boys, the sweet introvert Hal and the psychopath Bill (Christian Convery), alone. One day the boys find the tin monkey and before you can say “decapitation” a series of odd deaths plague the family and separate them. History starts repeating 25 years later, forcing Hal (now Theo James) to alienate his son Petey (Colin O'Brien) to protect him from what he thinks of as the Shelburn curse, and confront his estranged brother (also James).
This guy…
The Monkey feels a lot like Perkins taking a break from heady, heavy internal horror in the wake of the (teensy bit) overrated Longlegs, and letting loose to have a bit more fun this time around; he even has a cameo as one of Hal’s doomed relatives. There’s a sick and twisted sense of humour at play, helped along by some great comic timing on the editing (by Greg Ng and Graham Fortin) front – the series of funerals is hilarious – as well as a few barbed comments on modern conveniences/irritations like real estate agents and scam artists, embodied by Ted (Elijah Wood, hilarious), a snake oil doctor and Hal’s ex-wife’s new beau. The ace up Perkins’s sleeve is Maslany, who delivers the story’s ultra-thin theme in a brilliantly blasé monologue on life and death meant to soothe her boys that’s utterly ineffective.
The film’s main conceit is in the trailer – wind the monkey, someone dies, it decides – and after Perkins lays a modicum of thematic groundwork about the randomness and inevitability of death, lingering sibling resentments and the result of a lifetime of bad choices, he gets down to gory business (the swimming pool!) at lightning pace. At times The Monkey comes very, very close to being a horror spoof, but the perfect balance of comedy and gross-out keeps it honest. This is quick and dirty genre filmmaking, most times the best kind.
But… The Monkey’s fatal flaw (okay not fatal but you know what I mean) is, unfortunately, James in not one but two roles. James has all the parts to be a major movie star. He’s no Marlon Brando but he’s a solid actor, tall, dark and handsome, and barely 40. He’s white. But he’s also one of the biggest charisma sucks working. Netflix’s The Gentlemen series suffered because of a dull-ass lead, even with Daniel Ings tearing it up as the junkie brother. At first you think, “Hey, don’t judge him for Divergent,” but then he proves just as unengaging in Underworld: Blood Wars and almost everything since. Be honest: You confuse him with Sam Claflin all the time. In fairness James is dull – not inept – and Hal is something of an anonymous introvert anyway, so The Monkey has no trouble crawling out from beneath his dead weight to be a good time and a good spin on King with a deliciously bleak-funny ending. James gets to skate this time. Did we mention it was gory?