A blood-soaked, spineless story that takes more than two hours to crawl through its own pretensions.
"12 Monkeys" is a blood-soaked, spineless story that takes more than two hours to crawl through its own pretensions. It's hard to ruin a movie that sports the twin lures of postapocalyptic problems and time travel, but director Terry Gilliam and writers David Peoples and Janet Peoples have managed to do it. They have forgotten that a thriller rises or falls on humor, story, subtlety, or the striking eccentricities of its stars.
Deep beneath Philadelphia, in an underground world of eerie vertical dimensions, lives a group of people who survived the plague of 1997 that wiped out 99% of the world's population. Above ground, the unleashed virus waits to kill.
The group leaders pick James Cole (Bruce Willis) for the tube trip back to 1996 to determine the path of the fatal virus. While the antiseptic underground world is reassuringly alien, we chill as Cole travels back to the lifeless familiarity of Baltimore and Philadelphia. Some shoe display cases, a beautiful church, the remains of civilization in a numbing state of decay--all promise exhilarating fear.
Almost immediately, the promise melts. Cole, in his several attempts, lands successively in a mental institution, World War I, and modern Baltimore. In every case, he is an embattled nut case fighting to be heard, and we can only agree with the disbelievers. If Cole would just abandon his dementia, he might win a convert.
Instead he pursues The Army of the 12 Monkeys, whose leader, Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), waffles between hating and admiring his father, the renowned Dr. Goines (Christopher Plummer), a Nobel virologist. The resolution, which bears no connection to anything that has gone before, is an insult to an audience that has been trying diligently to follow the convolutions.
In a film that far outlives its capacity to interest us, even the landscape falls flat. The clocks, dials, and gears of the underground, all swathed in steam and plastic, are an attempt to overwhelm us visually, and they do nothing to advance the story. Above ground, everyone is just a notch this side, or that, of crazy.
Bruce Willis, always more appealing bald and scruffy than bewigged and beautiful, is forced to play his role covered with wet, flowing blood. Madeleine Stowe, the therapist who falls for her wild-eyed patient, was apparently directed to yell most of her lines. Brad Pitt, in apparent desperation, goes over the top as an eccentric crazy. Director Gilliam, perhaps sensing disaster, repeatedly lingers on the bare butts of Willis and Pitt, as if the very sight of them might distract us.
One scene clearly intended as memorable: Cole's superiors follow him by means of transmitters imbedded in his teeth. In order to free himself from their control so he may stay in 1996 with the woman he loves, he steps into a men's room and carves his radio-controlled teeth from his mouth with a knife. Just exactly what we all want to see after a hard day at the office.
Film Critic : JOAN ELLIS
Word Count : 501
Studio : Universal
Rating : R
Running Time: 2h11m
Copyright (c) Illusion