CONGO
[Spoilers]
A film review by Rob Furr
Copyright 1995 Rob Furr
Ask yourself this question: "How much would I pay to spend about two hours in an air-conditioned, dark room?" If your answer is higher than the price of a movie ticket in your area, then, by all means, go see CONGO this week.
That's the only real reason to go see CONGO. If the temperatures in your area are above ninety degrees, it's humid, the air conditioning in your apartment is out, there's only one theatre in town, and you only have two hours to kill before you have to be somewhere, then it's possible that going to see CONGO might be worth while.
Maybe.
It's been a long time since I've seen a big-budget summer action film as boring as CONGO. It's been about as long since I've seen a movie as badly made as CONGO, and, I hope, it'll be even longer since I see a movie like this again. (Of course, with WATERWORLD coming out soon, my hopes are not high.)
Remember those dreadful cheap jungle flicks from, oh, the mid-eighties? THE PERILS OF GWENDOLINE IN THE LAND OF YIK YAK? That sort of thing? The makers of CONGO obviously derived their inspiration from those films, instead of the jungle action films from the black and white era that were actually good. The plot makes as much sense (i.e., none,) the characterization is of the same quality (i.e., rotten,) the acting is of the same caliber (i.e., pretty damn rotten,) and the effects are just as good (i.e., not very.)
The story is ... well, I'll try to sum up: An expedition to the Congo finds really nifty diamons, which can be used to turn a laser into the Death Star's main gun. Unfortunately, just as they find the laser, the expedition gets killed by ugly thingies. The leader of the expedition is the son of the evil nasty businessman, who sends his son's fiance' into the jungle to find the diamonds. He doesn't care about his son, he just wants the diamonds, because, apparently, he needs a laser that can vaporize people on the Moon. This irritates the fiance' to no end. Meanwhile, a primatologist and his buddy (who has VICTIM stamped on his forehead in big letters from the instant he appears) decide that their ape, who's learned sign language, wants to go home. They can't afford to take her home, until a Rumanian shows up and offers to pay for the trip. Meanwhile, the fiance also shows up, takes over the expedition, and everybody flies to the Congo, where the evil nasty businessman has arranged for porters and equipment and guns. At this point, for no readily apparent reason, things start exploding. Things continue to explode for about half an hour, as the expedition, which is showing signs of Hollywood Conflict, proceeds into the jungle. We discover that the Rumanian wants to discover the Lost City of Zinj, where Solomon got his diamonds from, and he thinks the ape that's going home knows where it is. We also discover that Tim Curry can't do a Rumanian accent, but that's not important right now. What is important is that nothing much happens for another half an hour, until the expedition reaches the Lost City of Zinj, and people start getting their heads ripped off. One thing leads to another, and eventually everybody dies except for three people, who escape from the ugly thingies, the exploding volcano, and the Shaking Hollywood Disaster Landscape (left over from EARTHQUAKE, I'd assume), in a balloon, which completely ignores the fact that, during the half an hour when things exploded, we discovered that the area around the Congo is filled to the brim with surly people with anti-aircraft missiles who don't like people flying over the landscape. Regardless, the evil nasty businessman gets his, the ape gets laid, and everybody who's still alive is happy.
There.
You now no longer need to see CONGO. You'll note, by the way, that the ugly nasties, who are the major advertising point of the film, are pretty damn unimportant. They rip everybody's heads off, but in such a way that you don't *care* who ripped whose head off. For many of these characters, missing one's head could only improve things.
However, the plot synopsis only shows one thing--the utter silliness of the plot, and a silly plot is not enough to make a movie bad. What makes this movie bad is the rest of it--*every* aspect of it is rotten. The cinematography manages to completely fail at capturing any sense of spectacle or grandeur. The special effects are bad--the people in gorilla suits look like people in gorilla suits, which, in a film like this, is fatal. The sets look like sets. You can tell immediately when the film moves from shot-on-location to shot-in-a-warehouse-somewhere. The acting is boring (except for Ernie Hudson and Bruce Campbell, who are so much better than the rest of the actors in this piece of tripe that you feel sorry for them wasting their talent like this.)
And, what's more offensive, it's stereotypical Crichton. Yup. Mister I-Hate-Science himself is responsible for this travesty. There's a truly insulting sequence where one scientist, who theoretically has a doctorate, asks another scientist why he taught an ape to speak. The answer is *incredibly* annoying ("No reason," he says,) and the question is more so--in essence, the screenplay portrays science as something that is done for either a: completely ruthless exploitation, or b: aesthetic reasons which will never ever amount to anything. I can only imagine what happened to Crichton when he was young: possibly, he was frightened by Mister Wizard and has harbored a deep and abiding loathing of anyone daring to figure anything out ever since.
The movie doesn't even get bad *enough*, which is the worst bit of all. If it had gone through rottenness and out the other side, it could have been entertaining, if not good. It could have tried for camp, for tongue-in-cheek thrills. It didn't. It played it straight, and it's the worse for it, because it is so utterly, unredeemably boring. On the Furr Scale (I rate films on ambition as well as quality - you can't rate EVIL DEAD II on the same scale as THE RIGHT STUFF, for instance. An okay movie that tried to be great is different from a great 'bad' movie. ROBOCOP, for instance, is a three-star three star movie; a pretty good movie that aimed fairly high. HEAVEN'S GATE was a one-star four star movie; a bad movie that tried to be great. SOAPDISH was a three-star two star movie; a very good movie that didn't aim as high as it might,) CONGO is a one-star three star movie. Boring, dull, and uninvolving are the *best* words to describe it--I could be more descriptive, but that'd make this review R, instead of PG-13...
-- Rob Furr's HTMLized .SIG is at http://www.groucho.com/
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