The Media Tourist

Mia Goth returns to role of the monstrously troubled young woman who won’t let life stand in her way

Maxxxine
Starring Mia Goth, Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth Debicki, Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan
Directed by Ti West
Rated R

In theaters Friday, July 5

In the third film of director Ti West’s cult-favorite slasher-flick franchise, young Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) has set her sights on Hollywood stardom. But her violent past comes back to haunt her, as the only survivor of a horrific massacre when she was younger with some truly effed-up layers of deep trauma passed along from her sex-obsessed grandmother.  

At the screening I attended, I saw dozens of young women dressed like Goth’s character from previous films, in overalls, boots and bandanas, or blood-red 1900s dresses. One told me she loves these movies because Maxxxine has become an emblem of female empowerment, a young woman with life stacked against her who won’t let that stop her. Even if that means using an axe, a shotgun or a junkyard car-crusher to get there.

In Maxxxine, it’s now the mid-1980s and Goth’s character has added a couple of x’s to her name to reflect her success as a porn actress. But she wants more, to become famous as a mainstream star. A serial killer, murdering young women, is stalking Hollywood, and Maxxxine’s friends and coworkers are turning up dead and maimed. When she gets her big break, with a role in a non-porn horror movie, the icy female director (Elizabeth Debicki, below)warns Maxxxine to focus on her career, and to quash anything that might stand in her way. And you know she will.

Returning director Ti West has again created a super-stylized window into Maxxxine’s smeary world, swirling with grungy ‘80s esthetic and music. (In the opening scene, she struts out from an audition to ZZ Top’s “Gimme All Your Lovin’.”) It’s a meta-movie, a horror flick that stylistically recalls other horror flicks of its era. There’s over-the-top gore, extreme violence and intentionally campy dialogue. And like the previous films, it explores the seedy underbelly where promiscuous sex, pornography, hyper violence and religious extremism root around in the same grimy bed. Add some Hollywood dream-machine toxicity, and voila, you’ve got Maxxxine.

But it feels like more of a loose gorehound grab bag than a firmed-up story, with stabs of dark humor, lurid sights and grindhouse grit meant as a horror-movie homage to “exploitative” flicks from an earlier era. You know, exploding heads, mangled bodies and slashing knives.  And suitcases full of severed body parts.

Kevin Bacon has a hammy ball as a slimy private “dick,” an investigator hired to trail Maxxxine. Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan are L.A. homicide cops trying to sniff out the killer terrorizing Tinseltown. Giancarlo Esposito, from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is her slick fixer of a manager.  Lily Collins plays an ill-fated horror-movie costar. And there’s Sophie Tucker, from TV’s Yellowjackets, and the singer Halsey, who plays a short-lived porno pal.

But everybody and everything revolves around Maxxxine. And model-turned-actress Mia Goth is once again riveting as the young woman at the messy, macabre center, fighting “the devil” inside her as she charges into the fame she always wanted, grabbing for the life she insists she deserves.

Maybe her deeply troubled path left Maxxxine starving for attention while fating her for heinous acts of vengeful retribution. The movie opens with a quote from the late, great Hollywood diva Bette Davis, about how “until you’re known in my profession as a monster, you’re not a star.” Maxxxine is indeed a movie-star monster in stiletto heels, stabbing now into the dark heart of Hollywood, drawing new blood—and appeasing legions of fans who see her as more victim of circumstance than villain.

—Neil Pond

Babbling Minions again make this franchise frolic a river of fun & laughs

Despicable Me 4
Voices by Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig & Will Farrell
Directed by Chris Renaud and Patrick Delange
Rated PG

In theaters Wednesday, June 3

What’s the most successful animated series of all time? Shrek? Toy Story? Frozen? Nope, it’s this kid-centric movie-funhouse franchise frolic about a reformed bumbling supervillain, Gru, and his clattering, chattering yellow-nubbin assistants, the Minions. Its three previous films (and two spinoffs) have topped $4.6 billion at the box office.

The latest installment finds the reemergence of an old grudge between Gru (Steve Carell) and a former rival, Maxime Le Mal (Will Farrell), while the prankish Minions are being groomed to become superhero crime busters. It’s light and lively, infectiously clever and boisterously brisk as the Minions’ slapstick shenanigans continue to steal much of the comedic spotlight—although Carell and Farrell make a superb sparring pair, still smarting over schoolyard slights from their bad-guy academy days in the French Alps at Lycee Pas Bon (translation: Not So Good High School). And Kristen Wiig (as Gru’s wife, Lucy, a former agent herself) gets her own hilarious subterfuge subplot, masquerading in witness protection as a hair stylist who makes a very dissatisfied customer. This time around, Gru’s all about being a daddy to his babbling baby boy, which gives all the far-ranging fun a foundation in his hectic home life, as he’s flummoxed by milk choices at the supermarket and mixes up the diaper bag for his satchel of spy gear.

Jokes abound in the zippy script (co-written by The White Lotus’ Mike White) and the crazily creative visual riffs on everything from James Bond gizmos to Tom Cruise aerial stunts, Austin Powers outlandishness, Transformers, the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car and even Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock, by way of A-Ha. You won’t find many other movies with such an eclectic mix of plot devices and sheer throwaway sidelines gaggery, including a hyper honey badger, Minion-officiated tennis, a giant flying robotic cockroach and a baby billygoat that confuses the command to “sit” with, well, something decidedly messier on the floor.

Listen closely and you’ll also hear the voices of Steve Coogan, Stephen Cobert, Miranda Cosgrove, Joey King and Sofia Vergara coming from other colorful characters of all shapes and sizes. But no one works harder than Pierre Coffin, who provides the jibber-jabber babble of all the Minions. It’s hard not to love this little army of mayhem-making micro sidekicks, and it’s easy to see why—their childlike antics and nonsensical gibberish are the silly source that feeds this franchise’s river of nuttily creative nonsense and makes these Despicable flicks so darn delightful for kids of all ages.

—Neil Pond

Alien invaders descend on New York. So, what else is new?

A Quiet Place: Day One
Starring Lupita Nyong’o & Joseph Quinn
Directed by Michael Sarnoski
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, June 28

Shhhhhh! Be very quiet—I’m hunting wabbits.” Maybe you recognize that line from Elmer Fudd in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, decades before this horror franchise launched in 2018 with its scarifying tale of space aliens using supersonic hearing to gobble up humans who made any sound.

There aren’t any “wascally wabbits” in this prequel spinoff about the fateful day the aliens arrived, turning New York City into smoky piles of flaming rubble. But there is a calm little feline—Frodo—and a terminal cancer patient determined to make her way through the decimated core of the Big Apple. Because all Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) wants—all she’s living for—is one more slice of pie from the Harlem pizzeria near her childhood home.

Well, alrighty then—New Yorkers must really love them some pizza, even when under attack by space monsters.

Day One doesn’t have the sheer, pee-your-pants terror of the first movie, or its 2020 follow-up—mainly because we now know what we’re dealing with, the aliens’ ravenous M.O. and how steep the odds are stacked against humanity. “We’re all gonna die!!!!” screams one guy on a rooftop, and well, he’s not entirely wrong. A lot of people do perish, although we never really see them meet their messy ends; we just assume that’s what happens when they’re standing there one second, then—whoosh—an alien swoops in and they’re gone. Like hunting wabbits.

But the handfuls of survivors who somehow avoid becoming alien grub never seem very shell-shocked or shaken about the terrors they’ve been through, or the very dire possibility than any wheezy breath they take could be their last. Ah, those stoic, seen-it-all urbanites, jadedly shuffling off to their doom…or the pizza parlor.

Indie director Michael Sarnoski takes over the reins from John Krasinski, who also starred in the first two films. The former actor from TV’s The Office sits this one out on the sidelines, as a producer, and the movie really misses his touch and the star power he brought with his wife, actress Emily Blunt, to the other films. This movie’s secondary cast (Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsu) is way secondary to the convoluted story of Sam, her jazz-loving late father and the young British man (Joseph Quinn) who becomes her tagalong. But most of the characters, even the main ones, don’t invite much connection or empathy, unlike the imperiled “family members” of the previous films. And transplanting the story from the rural countryside to the hustle-bustle-y Big Apple…meh. We get it: New York’s a noisy place, a cacophony of chaotic sound, a melting pot that now includes aliens from another world. So, what else is new?  

And for a prequel, we never learn anything about the aliens that we didn’t already know, or not know. They’re still an enigmatic invading force from out there somewhere, scampering about like CGI spider monkeys, making a mega mess of things and apparently intent on wiping out humanity. There are a lot of jolt-y scares and some inventive sequences, like a life-or-death chase in a submerged subway. But the “suspension of disbelief” is really stretched, not by the armada of alien invaders, but by wondering how anyone could ever get a cat to be in or under water without having it totally freak out.

And maybe you won’t question how, in a city with no electricity, no running water, and almost everything alien-blasted to smithereens, can you still get pizza?

Early in the film, Sam watches a creepy marionette puppet show in a New York theater, just moments before all hell breaks loose on the streets outside. What did that scene have to do with anything? I’m clueless, except maybe it’s because, when it’s all over, a lot of viewers are going to feel like this Quiet Place was really just pulling their strings, drawing them into a franchise that feels like it’s already whispered all there was to say.  

—Neil Pond

Motorcycle gang roars through the Midwest in gritty drama with ring of ’70s authenticity

The Bikeriders
Starring Austin Butler, Jodie Comer & Tom Hardy
Directed by Jeff Nichols
Rated R

In theaters Friday, June 21

“I’ve never felt so out of place in my whole life,” says a doe-eyed young Chicago woman in this tale of rip-roaring greasy riders in the Midwest, recalling her first time being around a bunch of grungy, wild-ass, hog-straddlin’, born-to-be-wild biker-bar dudes.

Since the odds are that you don’t hang with a motorcycle gang, you might feel a bit out of place too, on the outside looking in at this burly subculture of bikes, brawls and broken bones based on a book by Danny Lyons, a gonzo photographer and journalist who rode with Chicago’s Outlaws Motorcycle Club—the oldest in the world, founded in the 1930s—for nearly five years in the 1960s. Lyons’ book, published in 1968, is now considered a bona fide classic of photojournalistic documentation.

The movie revolves around the relationship of brooding bad-boy biker Benny (Elvis’ Austin Butler) and a romantically smitten local gal, Kathy (Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer), as their lives become more entrenched and entangled in a gang called the Vandals, a fictional group but clearly based on the Outlaws. When the club progresses beyond the margins of society into real crime, Kathy wants Benny to leave.

But for biker clubs, loyalty is a big deal. In the opening scene, we watch Benny get a brutal beatdown because he won’t take off his Vandals jacket, his “colors,” in the presence of hostile non-riders. Later, another Vandal member is harshly disciplined when he expresses his plan to leave the group. There’s a code, rules and an unspoken expectation of lifelong fealty. Staying might not be easy, but quitting is even harder.

Motorcycle riders have long been romanticized and iconized as roguish delinquents, freedom-loving rovers and nonconformist brothers of the road, in movies like The Wild One (1953) with Marlon Brando, the countercultural classic Easy Rider (1969) and even the dopey comedy Wild Hogs (2007).  But in the real world, Chicago’s Outlaws and the California-based Hell’s Angels competed in an escalating competition for biker supremacy and notoriety, leading to a “war” with bombs and guns in Canada. The Bikeriders doesn’t go that far, but it does allude to other clubs and rivalries. With an almost tactile ‘70s aesthetic enhanced by an overlay of deep-cut soundtrack tunes from the era (like Gary U.S. Bonds’ “New Orleans,” the Animals’ “Talkin ‘Bout You” and Johnny Soul’s “Come and Get It”), its depictions of the Vandals’ increasingly dirty work sometimes give it the look and feel of a Goodfellas for gearheads, even down to the closing image.

It’s a scrappy, scruffy world, where baths and dental floss seem to have been long ago replaced by testosterone and booze, and disagreements are settled with fists, knives and guns. The Victors proudly sport the colorful nicknames that fit their personalities and status, like Cockroach, Wahoo, Big Jack and Corky. There’s Tom Hardy as Johnny, the club’s founder and leader, worried about the changes brought by the influx of younger, more volatile members. Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead is Funny Sonny, a hulking hippie biker from California grinning through a mouthful of rotting teeth. And Michael Shannon—who has so far been in every movie ever made by director Jeff Nichols, including Mud, Midnight Special and Loving—is the melancholy Zipco, lamenting how the Army once deemed him too “undesirable” to join.

The Bikeriders shows how a group of weekend dirt-bike off-roaders became a bigger, much more diverse and unruly cult, and ultimately devolved into a violent hierarchy of organized trafficking in drugs, gambling, prostitution and murder. But even outside the law, we see how the Vandals are bound by the ties to their community of like-minded outliers, like when they respectfully show up en masse (and unwanted) to a funeral of one of their own.

It’s ain’t always pretty, but it always feels pretty real—and feels true to the book by Lyons, who’s even a character in this film, interviewing and photographing these white guys on their loud bikes and the women who love them, in bars and pool halls, partying, chilling and brawling. Comer, from Britain, drives much of the movie’s narrative structure (through Kathy’s “flashback” interviews) and does a terrific job nailing a Midwestern accent and the brassy ‘tude of a true-blue Chicagoan. So does Hardy, also from England, who deftly wields all the “deez” and “doze” and “disses” and “dats” as handily as a switchblade. Butler, who most recently played a diabolical, ghostly white villain in Dune Part Two, seems to be distancing himself as far away as possible from the sanctifications of Elvis, this time zooming past stop signs, cops and corn fields on a noisy Harley.

Ready to get your motor runnin’ and head out on the highway? This ruggedly authentic immersion into a boisterous biker-verse of yesteryear might not be everyone’s cup of genteel movie tea. But if you’re curious about life in a rough-and-ready motorcycle club, well, hop on with the Vandals. Just bring your own switchblade—and, oh yeah, a toothbrush and some soap.

—Neil Pond

Disney/Pixar inventively goes inside the mind of a girl going into puberty, and it’s a wonderfully wild ride

Inside Out 2
With the voices of Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Maya Hawke & Ayo Edebiri
Directed by Kelsey Mann
Rated G

In theaters Friday, June 14

Almost a decade ago, Inside Out plunged us into the noggin of a young girl named Riley and a dedicated team of cartoonish characters—representing her emotions—helping her navigate childhood with a healthy balance of appropriate feelings.  

In this disarmingly creative coming-of-age sequel, the emotions in Riley’s head are once again led by Amy Poehler as the voice of Joy, the perky, blue-haired leader of a front-lobe squadron of Sadness (Phyllis Smith, from The Office), Fear (Tony Hale), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (The Equalizer’s Liza Lapira). Things are running smoothly; Riley, now 13 and on the cusp of high school, has become a good student, a great friend, a loving daughter and a promising hockey player.

But when a flashing red Puberty alarm suddenly goes off in command central, everything changes. A demolition crew barges in to radically reorganize the control room in Riley’s cranium to make way for the erratic tides of hormonal turbulence—and a new crew of feelings. And Joy suddenly finds herself contending with the newcomers for control of Riley’s consciousness.

As Riley tries out for a spot on the high school hockey team, the new flood of emotions responds to her uncertainties, confusion and awkwardness, charting her chaotic trajectory into a new phase of adolescence. Will she abandon her former friends and hockey mates to hang with the older, cooler players? Will she let her sense of competitiveness prevail over her natural kindness and empathy? Will she keep her cute, little-girl crush on boy bands and videogame heroes, or forge ahead into the more grownup tastes of her future?

It’s a superbly inventive depiction of puberty—how it’s messy, moody and often funny—with a small army of voices behind its characters, like Envy (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Disgust (Liza Lapira from The Equalizer), Ennui (French actress Adele Exarchopoulos), and Riley’s mom and dad (Diane Lane and Kyle McLauglin). Even John Ratzenberg makes a voice appearance, as he’s done in a host of other Pixar films, as a blue-hued construction foreman. June Squibb is Nostalgia, and the musician Flea is a cop.

But Maya Hawke—yes, the daughter of actor Ethan Hawke—all but steals the show as the hyper, wide-eyed, ever-fretful Anxiety, vying with Joy for the upper hand in Riley’s personality. And if you’re curious about the person behind young Riley, you can catch Kensington Tallman in the recent Max comedy series Home Sweet Rome!  

It’s masterfully clever, charmingly warmhearted and emotionally resonant as Riley’s emotions encounter all sorts of cerebral obstacles, including a literal Stream of Consciousness, a turbulent Brainstorm, deep rifts of Sar-Chasm, mountains of memories and a dark vault of secrets and discarded mental clutter. It’s an immensely enjoyable ride through the mind of a young girl going through some quantum changes as she emerges from the cocoon of tweendom. The Disney/Pixar imagineers have scored another triumph, making Riley’s swirling cocktail of hormones into something terrifically ingenious and totally relatable.

Wee little ones might be challenged to keep up with the frantic pace, the spewing fountain of ideas, the cascade of wit and the generous dollops of wisdom. But older kids and their parents will love this touching, vibrantly entertaining spin on a familiar phase of childhood that tosses us to and fro before setting us on the pathway to adulthood.  

This brilliantly zany puberty parable may take place in the head, but it ultimately lands squarely on the heart.

—Neil Pond

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence return for another blast of slam-bang action and ha-ha hinjinks

Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence
Directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilail Fallah
Rated R

In theaters Friday, June 7

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? If you’re these bad boys, you make another movie. Ride or Die is the fourth in the Will Smith and Martin Lawrence action-comedy franchise, which began almost 30 years ago. So predictably, the nostalgia factor is sky-high, with two familiar characters recalling their past as crime-fighting bros while getting pulled into a new adventure involving cartel and cop cross-contamination on the mean streets of Miami.

Quips and bullets continue to fly as the jam-packed plot bulges with a buddy-cop buffet of f-bombs and crude jokes about below-the-belt body parts. It’s often genuinely funny, but the humor coexists in this Bad Boys movie-verse alongside episodes of explosive violence and high-body-count action, making for some jarring tonal shifts. A former cop recalls getting his fingernails pried off as a gruesome cartel torture—but wait, there’s Martin Lawrence in a hospital gown on a balcony, showing off his erection to downtown Miami. Ha-ha, right?

Smith is police detective Mike Lowrey, who mostly plays serious straight man to the frantic goofball antics of his partner, Marcus Burnett (Lawrence). Mike is settling into new married life with his wife (Melanie Liburd, from Ghost: Power Book II), while Marcus fights an addiction to junk food and embraces a new spiritual transcendence after his near-death experience—claiming that, in a previous incarnation, Lowrey was his lowly donkey. And that’s not the movie’s only ass joke.

It gets a bit overcrowded with supporting players, including franchise alum and newbies. There’s Vanessa Hudgens, Eric Dane, DJ Khaled and even Michael Bay, who directed the first two Bad Boys films. Eric Dane (who played Dr. Mark Sloan on Grey’s Anatomy) makes a chilling villain, and Tiffany Haddish gets a couple of naughty chuckles as a randy strip-club proprietor. Joe Pantoliano’spolice captain was murdered in a previous film, but hey, he’s back too, in flashbacks and dream sequences.

It’s a feature film, but the movie’s rhythm and “beats” make if feel like a big-screen sitcom, where the stars are never really in danger and everything can be laughed off by the audience, if not the characters. Country superstar Reba McEntire might even laugh at a scene in which Mike and Marcus—held at gunpoint by a couple of hillbilly yahoos— struggle to recall any of her songs. There’s even a scene that gives a whimsical nod to the 2022 Oscars incident in which Smith slapped host Chris Rock.

And lest you forget the movie is based in Miami, you’ll be reminded by numerous scenic skyline shots, including repeated background nighttime appearances by the massive Observation Wheel on the shores of Biscayne Bay. That’s perfect backdrop mojo, apparently, for planning stealthy counterattacks, making phone calls full of plot exposition and having some serious buddy bonding.

Fans of the franchise will likely lap it up, but anyone not already baptized in Bad Boys will probably sense the sequel fatigue seeping in, as it invariably does to most flicks that try to extend their shelf life across multiple decades. Smith and Lawrence gamely embrace the older versions of their characters, talking about this new phase of their lives while dodging gunfire or arguing about who’s grilling the chicken at a family picnic. But the novelty—of smack-talking buddy cops—has certainly worn off.

They may have once been bad boys, but now they’re older dudes. “Just refuse to die,” Marcus tells Mike, espousing his newfound invincibility after momentarily expiring on a hospital bed. Bad Boys may not ride forever, but Smith and Lawrence certainly seem up for at least one more blast of slam-bang action and ha-ha hijinks.

—Neil Pond  

Daisy Ridley swims into sports history in high-spirited period-piece biopic

Young Woman and the Sea
Starring Daisy Ridley
Directed by Joachim RØnning
Rated PG

In theaters Friday, May 31

You probably don’t know (or don’t know much) about the first woman to swim the English Channel. So let this high-spirited, warm-hearted biopic introduce you to Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle, who in 1926 made a big splash by doing something that only five other people—all men—had done, completing what was thought to be “the hardest test in all of sports.”

And beating the boys at their own game.

Daisy Ridley, the British actress best known for playing the Jedi Rey in four Star Wars flicks, is Trudy, the headstrong youngest daughter of a family of German working-class immigrants in New York City. After nearly dying from measles as a child—and hearing of an onboard ship tragedy in which hundreds of women died because they didn’t know how to swim—she’s determined to conquer the water. But in 1920s America, swimming was primarily for boys and men due to societal prohibitions about women showing too much skin.

Based on a 2009 book of the same name, Young Woman and the Sea follows mostly standard biopic beats showing how Trudy grows up to defy her grumpy father (Kim Bodina), bond with her older sister (Tilda Cobham-Harvey) and align with her supportive, strong-willed mother (Jeanette Hain). The movie also offers some playful situational humor, as when Trudy annoys her father into agreeing to let her join a swim class, or later, when her measles-related hearing loss comes in handy by muffling a dissonant drone of bagpipes.  

Eventually Trudy starts winning competitions and getting medals, and she’s invited to represent the United States in the 1924 Paris Olympics. But as female swimmers make modest strides into the mainstream, Trudy sets her eyes on something bigger—breaking into, and breaking through, the boys-club claim on the most dangerous swim in the world, one that no woman had ever undertaken.

It’s hard not to be inspired by this true-story tale as she overcomes the norms of the times and prepares to swim across the treacherous, 21-mile stretch of waterway between England and France. She’s warned of the icy, 20-degree water, schools of jellyfish, occasional sharks and even some unexploded mines left over from World War I. She’s saddled with a coach (Christopher Eccleston) who gets seasick—and spitefully jealous of what she’s trying to do. She also gets help and tips from a colorfully boisterous Brit, Bill Burgess (Stephan Graham), one of the handful of men who traversed the Channel before her. And speaking of showing skin, Burgess likes to wear skimpy bathing trunks and sometimes swim in the buff. Cover your eyes, girls!

Norwegian director Joachim RØnning has a keen eye for the many in-the-water sequences, and an attention to period detail that enhances the mood and feel of the times, from huffing steamships, clacking telegraphs and flapping carrier pigeons to families glued to their radios to get the news. We get a glimpse of Tarzan-to-be Johnny Weissmuller, who was himself an Olympic-champion swimmer before Hollywood called. The popular ‘20s foxtrot tune “Ain’t We Got Fun” becomes Trudy’s musical mantra.

It’s a Disney movie, yes, but instead of cartoon animals and evil stepmothers, it’s a rousing tale of real-life feminism in the water and a young woman who was dubbed by the press as the “Queen of the Waves.” When she comes home victorious—and beating the men’s best Channel-crossing time by nearly two hours—New York City throws her the biggest ticker-tape parade ever, with even the New York Yankees (and Babe Ruth!) cheering from the packed sidelines.

The title might make you think of a fem-centric, youthful spin on another sea tale, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” Or perhaps Nyad, the recent Netflix film about Diana Nyad, in her mid-sixties when she swam from Cuba to Florida. Young Woman in the Water is an engaging look at the OG of female swimmers, a girl barely into her twenties when she made waves that rocked the world, who saw something she wanted, jumped in and went for it, stroking and kicking her way into sports history.

And yes, even swimming through a school of jellyfish. Ow!

—Neil Pond

Ferociously entertaining reboot shines with dazzling effects, action and emotion

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Starring Owen Teague, Freyda Allan & Kevin Durand
Directed by Wes Ball
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, May 10

In the newest installment of the durable film franchise about a world in which apes and humans coexist, a young chimpanzee squares off with a fearsome bonobo leader as all civilization hangs precariously in the balance. It’s a rip-roaring dystopian survival tale, a heroic journey, a parable about caring for our planet and an emotionally resonant tale about families, friends and the future.

But Curious George Goes to the Zoo, it isn’t. There’s some seriously muscular monkeyshine going on in this depiction of what happens when our young protagonist chimpanzee, Noa, sets out on a journey to find his clan, which has been subjugated into slavery by a cruel alpha-ape tyrant who calls himself Proximus Caesar. (All you Latin scholars will know that proximus means “next” or “nearest,” which is this monstrous monkey’s only relation to the late, great benevolent ape leader Caesar, who died at the end of the previous movie, 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes.) And Noa soon finds out just how the new Caesar is totally, despotically different from the old Caesar.

The new movie—the ninth in the canon—plunks us again down on Earth hundreds of years from now when apes have supplanted humans. We learn that the cause was a mutated virus with a world-changing side effect: It led apes to become fluent in speech (we know they know at least one common curse word!) and civilized, and dethroned humans into bands of feral, mute scavenging pests. The apes call humans echoes, suggesting their distant, faint resemblance to mankind of yore.  

As you might suppose, most of the characters here are apes, played and voiced by actors underneath deep layers of motion-capture effects and CGI. Owen Teague is Noa, Kevin Durand is Proxiumus, and Peter Macon is Raga, a sagacious old orangutan. There’s also a host of talent behind the performances of Noa’s ape clan, Caesar’s merciless foot soldiers, and hundreds of supporting simians. There are only a couple of non-monkeys in the mix—William H. Macy is a human now ill-advisedly serving as a lackey for Proximus, and The Witcher’s Freyda Allan plays Mae, an uneasy female echo who becomes an ally of Noa and Raga—but with an agenda of her own that is revealed later.

It’s an ape-tastic epic, action-packed and full of feels that will touch your (human) heart, tapping back into the sci-fi soul of the original Planet of the Apes in 1968. (There’s a scene with apes on horseback, snatching up men and women with nets, that will definitely give you Charlton Heston vibes.) The tech is nothing short of amazing, showing just how much SFX has evolved and progressed—to make ape characters look, move and behave like apes, instead of human actors in monkey suits and prosthetics. With fully emotive CGI faces and bodies, these apes feel like they’re on the vanguard of the next movie-effects breakthrough, the same way Avatar set a new motion-capture standard more than a decade ago.   

A couple of vertiginous “climbing” sequences, with the apes swinging like trapeze artists from mountainous peaks and scaling a sheer rock coastal cliff, will really get your blood pumping. The ape-on-ape fighting scenes have a fierce intensity that “human” actors can’t realistically match, with teeth-baring, chest-thumping, body-slamming brawls that might leave you feeling a bit bruised yourself.

In addition to allusions to politics, Roman history and power run amok, there are other touchstones. Monstrously menacing apes snarl like mini Kongs, ruling a brutish “kingdom” that resembles Col. Kurtz’s compound in Apocalypse Now.  Even little Curious George gets a wink-wink shoutout, in a children’s book found by the apes. Some of the apes-on-horseback scenes, clopping along with conversational banter, reminded me of Butch Cassidy and the Sunday Kid. The abandoned shells of human civilization—from rusted ship hulls to hollowed-out shopping malls and observatories overtaken by ivy—are stark suggestions about where humanity might end up someday, marked by decayed relics of long-forgotten science, advancement and history.

This ferociously entertaining franchise reboot (from director Wes Ball, who also directed The Maze Runner trilogy) lets us revisit a planet still evolving, a place where apes and humans still haven’t fully worked things out. Will they ever, or will one or the other always get the upper hand? In a closing scene as humans and apes both look above, gazing at the same stars in the same night sky, we’re left to wonder what they’re thinking—and wait, perhaps, for the next return to the Planet of the Apes.

—Neil Pond