When I was around 9 years old, my Oedipus complex kicked in and, in a belated identification with my neurotic and anal-retentive accountant of a father, I turned my chaotic bedroom into a clean, clinical office space, complete with swivel chair and meticulously arranged mahogany desk. But my friends declared themselves shocked and appalled at the soulless austerity of my living quarters, and in an attempt to add a bit of colour, they offered to decorate it, proceeding to plaster my walls with layers of random, garish crap. This included cuttings from video game magazines, a takeaway menu, and a promotional poster for the 1995 sci-fi / action movie Congo, meaning that, for around six months of my young life, a picture of an angry-looking monkey stared down at me from my bedroom wall.
But the most remarkable thing about this idiotic story is that, despite being menaced by the visage of Congo’s antagonist every day for half a year, I never actually saw the movie, or even really knew what it was about, except that it involved apes in a jungle. Also that the novel had been written by Michael Crichton who, of course, penned the book on which 1993’s Jurassic Park had been based. Nevertheless, the poster must have left some sort of impression, because its shadowy memory long haunted me, occasionally flickering into my conscious mind like, well, like long-buried images of humanity’s primal past. Until, that is, last week, when at the age of 41, I finally gathered the wherewithal to sit down, put Congo on the tablet, and bring resolution to this particular childhood trauma.
In doing so, I inflicted a new trauma on myself, because Congo is terrible, a kind of knockoff Jurassic Park but with less talented actors, a less interesting premise, a less competent director, and special effects that wouldn’t look out of place in a badly made turn-of-the-millennium video game. First, to the plot – which starts off remarkably convoluted for a film with such a basic narrative structure. Two scientific researchers go missing in the jungles of Congo, and the unscrupulous company they work for dispatches Dr. Karen Ross (played by Laura Linney, the poor woman’s Laura Dern) to find them. At the same time, the equally uncharismatic and forgettable Dr. Peter Elliott (Dylan Walsh) travels to Congo with a more idealistic purpose; to return his pet ape Amy, who he has trained to talk, to her natural habitat. They are joined by Herkermer Homolka, a Romanian philanthropist played by the reliably ridiculous Tim Curry, and Ernie Hudson’s Captain Kelly, the closest thing the film has to a halfway compelling and sympathetic character.
Despite the varying motivations of the film’s protagonists, they all ultimately find themselves caught up in a quest for the lost city of Zinj, a mysterious ruined civilisation deep in the jungle, said to be aflush with untold wealth and splendour. They find it, and it is indeed a holy grail for get-rich-quick diamond hunters. But as always with Ponzi schemes, there’s a catch – the city’s builders bred giant, highly aggressive, highly intelligent, appallingly animated apes as a kind of primal security force, and at the close of the film, our heroes are forced to contend with these beasts, giving rise to some of the most excruciatingly amateurish special effects and action scenes of the early 90s.
Obviously, it’s a blatant attempt to cash in on the success of Jurassic Park; the jungle setting, the mysterious, ancient, animalistic menace, the assortment of doomed humans motivated by greed, scientific curiosity, and a pragmatic will to survive. But the differences are equally glaring. Jurassic Park featured terrifyingly realistic dinosaurs, while Congo offers the aforementioned Blackpool Pleasure Beach-standard apes; Jurassic Park brought together the likes of Sam Neill and Richard Attenbrough, while Congo has Loaded Weapon’s Jigsaw doing a Romanian accent; and above all, Jurassic Park had the masterful Steven Spielberg to mask the obvious complications arising from the overly-ambitious script, while Congo has the jarringly limited Frank Marshall, who not only fails to mask such complications, but who seems to actively exaggerate them, particularly during the slapstick-like closing battle with Zinj’s singularly unintimidating apes.
Anyway, there’s no rhyme or reason to this redundant review of one of the 90’s most notorious cinematic duds, except that I felt compelled to lance one of the many formative boils on my tortured psyche. That seemed like reason enough before I watched the film but, after sitting through two hours of postcolonial high camp, maybe it would have been better to let sleeping apes lie.
Overall rating: *