12 MONKEYS
And Now For Something Completely Different
A film review by John Paul Powell
Copyright 1996 John Paul Powell
Published In The Outreach Connection Newspaper (Jan. 5, 1996)
Starring: Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt and Christopher Plummer. Directed by: Terry Gilliam. Screenplay by: David Peoples and Janet Peoples. Produced by: Charles Roven. A Universal Pictures release.
I can hear the faint moaning and groaning. A time travel picture? Have to
think...Brain hurts...Smell smoke...Is something burning?...System overload...
Migraine coming on...Fading to black...Nighty-night...<
What a revolting development! Filmmakers encouraging you to exercise your grey matter? Where do they get off? They deserve forty lashes! Step By Step and Baywatch. That's quality. Television mind candy that doesn't require brain cells to produce or to watch.
Mongoloid tube-heads bearing the attention spans of a box of stale donuts and whose usual reading material is...
Beverly Hills, 90210 (cc) 1:00 Brandon flosses his teeth while David smokes crack. Donna, the retard, attends a self-help seminar and figures out how to operate a door knob. Valerie beds Steve, David and the California Angels starting lineup. Kelly is stalked by a serial rapist, sexually harassed by a co-worker, shot at by a street gang, kidnapped by an ex-boyfriend, blackmailed by the Mob, abducted by a UFO and gets a trendy haircut. Nat joins a Columbian drug cartel.
...shouldn't be mentally taxed by 12 Monkeys if they cling to my handy TV references.
Bruce Willis (David on Moonlighting) is a prison inmate in the year 2035 (before Star Trek but beyond Melrose Place). The screws buzzed Bruce's cranium (Kojack, Capt. Picard), tattooed his prisoner number on it and deposited him in a cage. That's right, a CAGE not a cell. Hard ass dive this future world. Everyone's cranky since the holocaust.
In 1996, a mutant virus devoured 99 per cent of Earth's population. The toxic surface atmosphere drove mankind underground. Immune to the contagion, animals (Flipper, Lassie) rule the planet.
Scavenging Beta vcrs, gum wrappers, paper clips and duct tape from above ground, the surviving scientists built a time machine (as in Dr. Who's Tardis) to send someone back to prevent the apocalypse. That "someone" is Willis. He's got a photographic memory. He ain't too sharp and he's haunted by a childhood memory that could unlock the secret of the 12 Monkeys (the Egghead's solitary clue to who or what ignited the plague). He's got the job. At least they didn't choose Pauly Shore or Jim Varney. Thank God for small miracles.
The Eggheads botch the first expedition. Willis beams in too early and the local fuzz arrest him. His 12 Monkeys and apocalypse ravings land his sorry ass in the nut house. Incarcerated, he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the unstable son of a famous scientist and Dr. Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe), a shrink and writer. Being tugged in and out of the present (therefore existing in two time frames) erodes Willis' sanity. The doomsday clock takes a lickin' but keeps on tickin' as Willis screws his head on straight.
The universes director Terry Gilliam conceives routinely bend and contort as if projected through fun house mirrors. People, places and things don't have rhyme, reason or a determined purpose (The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, Brazil, The Fisher King). His experience as a cartoonist (Help! Magazine) and animator (Monty Python's Flying Circus) help and hinder Gilliam in the filmmaking process. His boundless imagination give genesis to eye-catching visuals. By the same token, the incessant flights of fancy stretch and snap continuity.
Finally with 12 Monkeys, Gilliam has cleared his personal hurdle. Production designer Jeffrey Beecroft (Dances With Wolves) and cinematographer Roger Pratt (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Batman) maintain the fabulous optics but the script is tight. There's structure. There's direction. We don't get lost in the shuffle. That is unless your idea of a weekly mental workout is whether Fraiser or Home Improvement wins out on Tuesday night.
12 Monkeys is rated U for Unusual. Frank Gorshin (The Riddler on TV's Batman) x nitro-injected Brad Pitt - a slow midpoint + Pitt's naked butt - Willis' naked butt (twice) x spectacular set design x no convoluted time travel paradoxes + off-kilter camera angles + spottings of Monty Python humor x Gilliam's restraint = bad title, good film.
Outreach Rating: 8 dead parrots / 10
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