Mighty Joe Young

The terrible movies I watch for you people.

Honestly I think we’re going to have to get into spoiler territory with this one. I don’t normally do that, because normally, I can convey a movie properly without needing spoilers. Heck, I’ll routinely discuss the shorts without giving away the ending, even when the ending is just one more gag, because I’ve trained myself over the years to write reviews of the most amazing things without giving spoilers. For example I have written reviews of Psycho, The Crying Game, and even Soylent Green without revealing the endings. But friends the 1998 Mighty Joe Young—I’ve never seen the original—has broken me.

Jill Young (Mika Boorem) lives with her mother, primatologist Dr. Ruth Young (Linda Purl) in mountains in Central Africa that share a name with a town in coastal Tanzania but shhhhh. Ruth is studying, you know, mountain gorillas. However, a group of poachers led by sinister possibly Lithuanian Strasser (Rade Šerbedžija) kill basically the entire group being studied except young Joe, who is also growing faster than gorillas do, as well as killing Ruth. Before she dies, Ruth makes Jill promise to care for Joe, because Joe has lost his mother that night. Then she dies.

Jill grows up to become Charlize Theron, still living in [mumble mumble], [African nation]. A conservationist, Gregg O’Hara (Bill Paxton), arrives to I guess get DNA samples from various of the local animals, and somehow this lures Joe, now fifteen feet tall and ostracized from his tribe, to rescue—you know what, it doesn’t matter. What with one thing and another Gregg convinces Jill that bringing him to LA is the only way to keep him safe, at an animal preserve that is, in Disney tradition, not a zoo. Naturally, this all goes on the news, which is how Strasser finds out that Joe is still around and now huge and accessible.

From here, things get silly. Strasser and his minion Garth (Peter Firth), with him as always, attend the gala dinner to introduce Joe to the people who can afford to help the conservatory. They have provoked Joe, for reasons, and Strasser previously convinced Jill—who doesn’t remember him, though Joe does—that he owns a nature preserve in Botswana that will be safer for Joe. Joe gets out of his enclosure to go after Strasser and Garth. He’s locked up until the City of Los Angeles figures out what’s going to be done with him. Strasser gets Jill to smuggle Joe out of the enclosure so he can kill him and sell the bits and incidentally he’s going to kill Jill for reasons.

If you’re not laughing yet, you will be. Because Joe manages to get out of the truck and he’s off across the city while Jill realizes who Strasser is. She somehow pairs back up with Gregg. Meanwhile Joe climbs Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, then he’s pursued by LA SWAT across the city. He climbs the Hollywood sign, or a reasonable mockup thereof, from which he sees the lights of Santa Monica Pier. He thinks the giant searchlight is Jill’s flashlight and heads there. Across the freeway and along the LA River. In our climax, the pier is on fire and the James Horner score is swelling. Joe flings Strasser into power lines for a ludicrous death then rescues a child from a Ferris wheel, which topples onto Joe and we think he’s dead but he’s not and then people start donating money and now there’s a nature preserve. The end.

This is, obviously, a lot. I laughed so hard that I woke up the cat asleep in my lap. Because I could not take it at all seriously. I couldn’t take any of this seriously, but the ending got sillier and sillier and I just couldn’t anymore. I think I started laughing when Joe crosses the 405 and didn’t stop possibly until the end credits rolled. When Jill is despairing at how much it will cost to find somewhere truly safe for Joe and the kid he’s just saved offers the possibly three bucks in his pocket, followed by the cop who was going to shoot Joe offering the money he’s got on him—that’s the point where the cat woke up.

Apparently, one of the problems with this movie is that the motivation Jill has in the original is taking Joe to be a nightclub act and make bank. This is not motivation that sells as well in 1998. (The shooting range has a gorilla-shaped target and I know it’s a joke and I still thought, “There’s no way.”) So they give the conservationist angle. But the stance the movie takes is that taking Joe to LA was a mistake—not entirely wrong—but come on, poachers knew he existed. You don’t have to know a ton about primatology in Africa, and I know a primatologist who’s worked in Africa, to know how dangerous Africa can be for protected species and those trying to protect them.

The original Mighty Joe Young can safely be called the lesser of RKO’s Making Money With A Giant Ape pictures. I will say, though, that it was nice to see an RKO logo, albeit not the classic one, at the beginning of the picture. There’s also a really, really blatant cameo with Ray Harryhausen, who did the effects for the original, and Terry Moore, the original Jill. It’s the best thing in the movie, admittedly not the highest bar out there. The effects in this one were primarily Rick Baker, and that’s not terrible, but it seems he spent years saying “I’m not doing any more ape effects” and should’ve stuck to that.

Frankly, the whole of the cast is too talented for this movie. Peter Firth was nominated for an Oscar for Equus, back at the beginning of his career. David Paymer was also nominated for one for Mr. Saturday Night. (They lost to Jason Robards and Gene Hackman, respectively.) Regina King has a minor role in the movie, meaning both of the actresses who appear in more than one section of the movie have Oscars. Paxton doubtless would’ve gotten a nomination at least by now had he not died nearly a decade ago. James Horner has two as well, both for Titanic, Rick Baker won seven, and Ray Harryhausen had a special award. Even director Ron Underwood, admittedly without an Oscar nomination, has a pretty solid career.

I had never seen this movie until just now. I would’ve been okay with not having seen it. I watched it alone, without my children, and I don’t think my children would’ve liked it if they had watched it. Also it’s about fifteen or twenty miles from the Hollywood Sign to the Santa Monica Pier, depending on how you go, and I can’t think Joe knows the best path. And that’s after the five miles from Grauman’s to the Hollywood Sign. And never mind, you know, you can’t just scale up a gorilla and a one-ton gorilla wouldn’t be able to support its own weight. I could ignore that for the original King Kong much easier, somehow, and he’s bigger.

Though it was while watching the 2005 King Kong that I realized that, if I’m focusing on the predator-prey ratio or similar, that’s a bad sign because your movie hasn’t distracted me enough. I spent a lot of the movie thinking about things like, “Would Joe be more likely than other gorillas to have white sclerae?” And “what educational level does Jill have actually?” And “who should have been her legal guardian?” And things like that. Which should tell you exactly what I thought of this movie, in case you hadn’t already worked that out on your own.