C+ | A primatologist and a communications scientist team up on a mission into an African nature preserve. Directed by Frank Marshall Starring Dylan Walsh, Laura Linney, and Ernie Hudson Review by Jon Kissel |
From this pulpy source material comes John Patrick Shanley, an esteemed playwright and mystifying screenwriter. His adaptation of Congo further degrades any respectability associated with Crichton, but he at least understands the appropriate tone for this story. Through Shanley, Congo becomes absurd and Marshall takes that absurdity and runs it through the casting department. He casts Dylan Walsh with a curly-haired perm as his male lead, ham extraordinaire Tim Curry as a mysterious benefactor, and camp horror icon Bruce Campbell as a prologue character whose absence is supposed to be some kind of motivating factor. Those choices don’t get made unless everyone’s in on the joke. On this rewatch, Congo becomes more Operation Dumbo Drop and less Apocalypse Now.
This is a deeply silly film, embodied by the character of Amy the gorilla. Reared by Walsh’s primatologist Peter Elliot since she was a baby, Amy’s been taught sign language a la Koko the gorilla. Elliot’s big advancement is to connect her sign language to a translator that sounds like a little girl and makes me laugh every time it says ‘bad gorilla’ or ‘tickle me.’ This feels like a calculated choice to desexualize Amy, because Elliot has far more chemistry with her than he does with Laura Linney’s Karen Ross. It’s perfectly fine and even admirable that two characters who just met under these harrowing circumstances wouldn’t be thinking about where to eat on their second date, but there is an expectation that they’d have something between them based on so many movies like Congo. It’s funny that they don’t because Amy would probably get jealous and rip Ross’ arms off. Adding to the goofy quotient is Curry, putting on an Eastern European accent because it’s probably in his rider. I can imagine Shanley’s original script with a shady money man named Harold Honeycutt and then Curry shows up on set having chosen this accent out of a hat and now the character has to be Herkermer Homolka.
Within the absurdity of the basic plot, wherein Elliot’s mission to return Amy to the Virunga jungle overlaps with Ross’ mission to find the remains of Campbell and his party of diamond seekers, are characters who recognize exactly what they’re doing and have a great time with it. Delroy Lindo as a warlord, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as the lead porter, and Ernie Hudson as the guide and third lead are each legitimately great. In the same way his Oz psychopath loved every second of his misdeeds, Akinnuoye-Agbaje exudes cheerful competence, right up to the moment he’s bashed to death by the ‘bad gorillas.’ Though he’s limited to one memorable scene, Lindo gets to berate Curry, a treat for any actor. Of the three leads, Hudson is the runaway winner in the charisma department. Sporting a vague posh accent, the movie rockets up several levels when he finally appears onscreen. I’d watch him share cigarellos with a gorilla for the entire 100 minute runtime.
As much as I think Congo’s in on its own joke, events at the climax tip the balance. Marshall’s complete inability to film a coherent attack by the bad gorillas robs the film of its stakes, such that everything ceases to make geographic sense and the characters stop trying to preserve their own lives. This extends to the gorillas themselves, last seen doing dives into lava after being cut to pieces by Ross’ diamond-powered laser. Did I mention this is a stupid movie? Congo nabs some casting coups that elevate the proceedings, but it leaves the viewer laughing at the events onscreen, and not in a good way. It’s fun and disposable and a relic of its time, like a banana with a quaalude stuffed in it. C