MIGHTY JOE YOUNG A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 1998 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): ** 1/2
If you find those irritating car burglar alarms that go off for no reason whatsoever to be the equivalent of fingernails across a blackboard, the movie MIGHTY JOE YOUNG suggests the perfect solution. You need to ask your spouse for a 2,000-pound gorilla for Christmas. Being close ancestors to Homo sapiens, big apes hate those loathsome alarms as much as we do, but they can do something dramatic about it. And if you're an overgrown ape like Joe, the film's humongous star, all you need to do is stomp and sit on the screeching car a few times in order to turn it into raw recycling material.
Ron Underwood, who has given us comedies as brilliant as CITY SLICKERS and as dreadful as SPEECHLESS, directs this remake of the 1949 movie MIGHTY JOE YOUNG. Besides the realistic looking gorilla, the stars of the movie are A SIMPLE PLAN's Bill Paxton as Gregg O'Hara, a conservationist, and CELEBRITY's Charlize Theron as Jill Young, Joe's companion and surrogate mother.
The movie opens years earlier when Joe and Jill are both youngsters. Poachers come into the animal preserve where Joe lives with his mother and Jill with hers. On a dark and misty night, the poachers kill both mothers. Jill hides with Joe then and for years afterwards. The sweet image of them nestled together, while hiding in the heavy brush, is one of many such tender moments in the picture.
The gorgeous Charlize Theron takes care of Joe like a mother of a super-economy-sized toddler. Their favorite game together is hide-and-seek, which takes on a whole new meaning when one of the players is Joe's size. Joe solves this with a little kid's trick of making himself invisible by covering his eyes with his hands. The childlike innocence of these game scenes and the one of Jill is being cuddled while singing Joe to sleep are the movie's best.
The formulaic plot with cartoon-cutout villains is the story at its worst. As Strasser, Rade Serbedzija plays the cliched leader of the bad guys as he did previously in THE SAINT. Little Joe chews off a finger and a thumb from Strasser's hand in the beginning of the movie. Throughout the movie, the camera loves to stare at the hand with the missing digits. This is just one of the cheap tricks that the director falls back on when he can't think of anything else to do. Another is the slapstick action with Joe tossing large items like jeeps around as if they were kitty toys.
When Charlize Theron smiles at Joe, he obeys. The men in the audience will have no problem believing this. Most would be happy to follow her commands. The chemistry between Joe and Jill is excellent, as is the love interest between Gregg and Jill.
The problem with the movie, most of which happens when Joe is brought back to LA to protect him from poachers, is that the entire story can easily be reduced to 2 parts. The gorilla is either growling, which may scare the daylights out of some kids, or playing, which will delight everyone. The story itself is so thin, involving the evil Strasser's attempt to steal Joe for his body parts, that it keeps dragging.
The movie tries to have a surprising ending but can't quite bring itself to do it. In ends nicely enough but in the same formulaic spirit of the rest of picture. Even so, you can't help but have a soft spot in your heart for a film with a lovable ape and two charming human leads. The three of them are better than the movie that they are in.
MIGHTY JOE YOUNG runs too long at 1:54. It is rated PG for violence and would be fine for kids around 8 and up, although some younger kids may be able to handle it.
My son Jeffrey, age 9, thought the movie was sort of "so-so," and gave it **. He complained that it should have been rated PG-13 since he found some of it scary.
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com Web: www.InternetReviews.com
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