Congo (1995)

Congo (1995)

Directed by: Frank Marshall

Starring: Laura Linney, Dylan Walsh, Ernie Hudson

So we’ve got the producer of tons of huge, great movies directing, a movie based on a Michael Crichton novel, which several other good movies have been based, and there’s top notch special effects (for the time)… So why is this movie the worst thing ever in the world ever made ever?

Okay, so it’s not that bad, but it is terrible, and I’m pretty sure nobody will argue with me about that one. The basic idea is that a communications company has sent out a research team to the Congo jungles to find a source of perfect diamonds to power some new communications satellite laser or somesuch nonsense. After the first expedition (led by Bruce Campbell in a delightful little cameo where he gets eaten) claims to have found the diamonds and then gets killed off, the company has to send in another expedition to find them. They can’t just go in and straight up say why they have to go in (for some vague reason), so they disguise the rescue team by funding this wacko primatologist (Walsh) who’s taught his pet gorilla to talk using a machine that turns sign language into spoken words on his quest to return the talking monkey to her home jungle, which is exactly the same place, conveniently enough.

Once they get to the source of the diamonds, they discover it’s King Solomon’s ancient diamond mine, and it’s protected by a group of specially trained attack gorillas (what do you call a group of trained attack gorillas, anyway? A pack? A clutch? A football team?). The gorillas attack everybody and everybody tries to not be attacked by the gorillas. It pretty much ends when they start hacking up gorillas with the diamond-powered laser and a volcano explodes and everything else just blows up a bunch.

Turns out the reason this movie was so bad was a lot of little things put together. First off, turns out that not everything Michael Crichton writes transfers to a good film. Take Timeline, for example. A neat book, but… wow, I’ve never hated a movie with Billy Connolly more. Another reason could be that, although Frank Marshall has produced a ton of great movies like the Indiana Jones series and the Back to the Future movies, but it turns out that producing and directing are different jobs altogether, and doing one well doesn’t really mean you’ll be good at another. Of the other three movies he’s directed, one was Eight Below, so that doesn’t give one much hope. The third piece to this puzzle that I may or may not be completely making up is the casting. The acting credits for Congo read like a complete list of the biggest B-movie actors of the 90’s. You’ve got Joe Don Baker as the money-crazed CEO of the communications company, Bruce Campbell, Joe Pantoliano as (an annoying) bit character, Tim Curry as a Romanian with the hammiest fake accent ever, and Ernie Hudson as a very charming “great white hunter” (though I admit I liked him a lot better in this movie than in Ghostbusters). I mean, come on, as soon as you put Tim Curry in your movie, it’s doomed to fail. I’m not saying anything against Curry, I happen to like his unique way of chewing the scenery, it’s just that he never seems to be in any… good movies.

So yeah, Congo is a terrible movie that they probably thought would do as well as Jurassic Park. All the same elements were there, but the sad truth is that fighting killer monkeys with laser guns and your own talking monkey is nowhere near as entertaining as people trying to not get eaten by dinosaurs. I know, it’s a weird distinction to make, but it’s true. Should you ever want to see a bunch of decent gorilla costumes, go ahead and watch Congo. There is really no other reason to ever watch this movie.