‘Primate’ review: Monkey see, monkey kill
One chimpanzee with a typewriter could pound out the script for “Primate” in an hour. Some pretty young things throw a pool party at an Oahu home and — yikes! — the family’s rabid pet chimp bashes in their skulls. That’s it, that’s the plot. Any tease that the movie could possibly be about anything more — a love triangle, a recently deceased mother, a vet’s puzzlement that Hawaii doesn’t even have rabies — is nothing but a banana peel tripping the audience into expecting a narrative.
I’m not foaming at the mouth over the death of cinema or what have you. Honestly, “Primate’s” kills are great. The problem is the dead space between them when we realize we’re bored sick.
The set-up is thus: Our heroine, Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), who goes to school somewhere to study something, has flown home for an indefinite amount of time with her best friend, Kate (Victoria Wyant), and a classmate she loathes, vivacious sexpot Hannah (Jess Alexander), who doesn’t inform her host that she’s tagging along until they’re on the plane. Already, you’re wondering if this is a monkey’s take on mammalian behavior, but it’s just the actual screenwriters, Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera (the former of whom also directs), clueing us in that bringing a brain to this humid adventure is as futile as packing a snowsuit. (They previously teamed up for the 2017 Mandy Moore shark movie “47 Meters Down.”)
Lucy’s father, Adam (Troy Kotsur of “CODA”), and her younger sister, Erin (Gia Hunter), have been rattling around their cliffside estate grieving for her mother, a primatologist who passed away from cancer the year before. They’re both lonely, but at least mom left behind her research chimpanzee, Ben (performed by Miguel Torres Umba), who uses a talking touch pad to communicate.
“Lucy back, Ben miss,” the chimp says, pressing a few keys. This is more or less how all the dialogue goes even when the humans are speaking — which, when it comes to a pair of frat guys that the girls picked up on the plane, is part of the joke. Brad and Drew (Charlie Mann and Tienne Simon) enter the house like two gorillas, belching and high-fiving, expecting to seduce the girls with verbal skills that stopped around preschool. “Me no hurt, OK?” Mann’s hilarious Brad says to Ben, grinning nervously and clapping his hands in an attempt to make friends. For a tender moment, you think these apes might be soulmates.
“Primate” is gleefully unevolved. The fatalities are gruesomely entertaining, the opening murder splattering the audience with such brutality that my theater howled in delight. In just two minutes, the movie had delivered everything it promised: a snorting monkey, a sucker in a flowered shirt, a shot of an ominous tire swing and a closeup of a peeled cheekbone.
If the pace had stayed that breakneck, my fellow schlock-lovers and I would have merrily pounded our chests. But at a hair’s breadth under an hour and a half, “Primate” is mostly draggy scenes of victims hiding in closets and trying not to scream as Ben roams the property acting like a hungover, steroidal toddler. Anything screechy sends him into a violent fit.
Umba, the movement specialist underneath the simian special effects, is convincing. But the movie treats his character like a generic slasher baddie checking off the standard tropes: the jump-scare surprise, the out-of-focus loom, the beat when the villain appears bested yet somehow staggers to his prehensile feet. Roberts doesn’t offer much empathy for the poor, diseased critter other than a pause when Ben momentarily ponders his reflection in a pool as Adrian Johnston’s eerie synth-piano score tinkles.
Let me give the film some credit: the performances are pretty good. Recent Oscar winner Kotsur has a casual nonchalance that makes you buy into his character right up until the moment he starts punching a monkey in the face. While Mann’s doomed meathead is only in the movie to raise the body count, the young actor brings a goofy, kinetic charisma to his too-few scenes — and, as a reward, Roberts grants him the longest and best death. Set in a romantic bedroom, it plays like a morbid joke about consent. (We’re meant to assume that at some time in this horny jock’s past, he’s done something to deserve it.)
Likewise, Alexander’s Hannah is the naughty girl who deserves to be punished for rudely moving in on Lucy’s crush, Nick (Benjamin Cheng). But she’s so magnetic that we root for her survival anyway. Just as Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey somehow managed to have careers after starring in the fourth “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Alexander is a performer with promise: a screen presence with that extra twinkle.
The script has an anthropologist’s curiosity about the mating habits of Homo sapiens collegiate. Alas, humanity appears to be a species in decline. Faced with an angry monkey, these kids can’t think of much else to do other than run around hunting for their smartphones. An overreliance on tools weakens our civilization (and saps the film’s dramatic thrills). When Ben smashes a television set, perhaps Roberts is even making some sort of societal point.
Chimpanzees and humans share 98.4% of the same DNA and if you want to double-check that stat, so much blood gets smeared around this house that you can easily test a sample. Presumably, the character of Lucy was given her name as a nod to our earliest known ancestor, a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis who stood about the same height as Ben. Our closest relative, the bonobo, shares 98.7% of our genes and has been known to dispatch each other by bursting a male’s testicles, a nature fact that Roberts must be saving for the sequel.
Mystifyingly, “Primate” blames Ben’s terrible temper on rabies, not the more interesting causes of chimpanzee aggression like depression, psychological confusion and over-medication. Neither does it dig deep into the emotional horror of an owner realizing their best buddy is capable of ripping off a human face — let alone the guilt and agony of failing to stop an attack. When a Connecticut woman was forced to stab her beloved pet after he maimed a female friend, she lamented that sticking the blade in him “was like putting one in myself.” (She later adopted a replacement chimp.)
But it’s silly to expect actual social science from a movie that expands rabies’ ancient name — hydrophobia, or a fear of water — into the nonsensical idea that the only safe hideout from Ben is the swimming pool. That said, in case anyone from the Department of Health and Human Services watches “Primate” on an airplane, I feel compelled to mention that the rabies vaccine is 100% effective. The last thing we need is a government decree that every American should surround their house with a moat.
‘Primate’
Rated: R, for strong bloody violent content, gore, language and some drug use
Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes
Playing: In wide release
