Now on Screen: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Viva Riva!, The Change-Up

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you Now on Screen, a weekly roundup of new releases.
It’s a madhouse! A MAAAAAAADHOUSE! Now that that’s out of the way, we can tell you, emphatically, that the new Planet of the Apes reboot is no good. Surprise, surprise, right? Better than some damned, digitally dirty apes are a new Congolese crime flick and a movie in which Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman swap bodies. And lives!

Rise of the Planet of the Apes Directed by Rupert Wyatt

Viva Riva! Directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga

The Change-Up Directed by Davd Dobkin

You’d think the last nail in the coffin of the Planet of the Apes series of ape-based science-fiction properties would have been “A Fish Called Selma,” that great seventh season Simpsons episode where down-and-out actor Troy McClure was cast in an Andrew Lloyd Webberish disco-musical version of Planet of the Apes as a means of diverting media attention from his unspeakable sexual proclivities. Surely, the franchise could not recover from a break-dancing Dr. Zaius? Even Tim Burton’s abysmal 2001 remake seemed less a last gasp at relevancy than a “bring out yer dead!” call, confirming for certain that interest in a series of movies where apes rule the world and humans are slaves is of no interest to anyone.
Well this new reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (which is basically a compressed half-remake of 1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes and 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes) solves the problem of no human being conceivably interested in Planet of the Apes. Instead, they made a movie for the apes: a triumphant chronicle of ape uprising, of the crushing of humanity’s hubris. And if I were an ape, I’d love it. But because I am, alas, a human whose humanity has more to do with my ability to think and reason and sniff out shitty logic than my capacity to wear a pair of jeans, I think it’s lousy.
The original Planet of the Apes films weren’t exactly fleet-footed in their preachy allegories of race, animal cruelty, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation. But they were, for the most part, fun. And even at their most serious, they were unambiguously silly. Because come on. People in ape suits, for Christ’s own sake. This new… thing… is moronically self-serious. We are supposed to believe—among other things—that James Franco is a hotshot scientist who doesn’t age, that John Lithgow isn’t just the dad from 3rd Rock From the Sun, that obviously CGI apes are not obviously CGI, and that Andy Serkis is a fantastic actor because he’s good at barrelling around in a mo-cap suit making sad puppy dog faces.
Anyways, it goes like this. A scientist (Franco) is working on a brain-generating cure for Alzheimer’s, from which his dad (Lithgow) suffers. He’s testing it on CGI apes. One of these apes dies, but not before she gives birth to Caesar (Andy Serkis), an ape whom the scientist smuggles out of the lab and raises in his own suburban San Francisco house. After testing his experimental serum on his dad, the scientist gets results. He also finds that Caesar has genetically inherited enhanced intelligence from his mother. Eventually Caesar goes from being tiny and smart and cute to big and smart and dangerous (cf: Project Nim, an actually good monkey-based movie about mankind’s egoistic abuse of simians). Dolled up in jeans and a sweatshirt (he thinks he’s people!), he ends up being relocated to a detention facility that works like a monkey version of Oz, complete with established power dynamics and unchecked yard violence. After working the system like an ass-scratching Ryan O’Reily (there ya go, Oz fans), Caesar successfully mounts an escape that marks the first stage in a full-blown ape-uprising.
There is for sure a good movie here. The problem is it was already made in 1968. Rise trades nuclear anxiety for contagious virus anxiety, which isn’t nearly as salient in our culture (does anyone even care about bird flu anymore?) as the fear of a bomb dropping and wiping out everything at any given moment. Franco may be the contemporary master of the meta-star text, but he’s still nowhere near as robustly interesting (or fun to watch) as Charlton Heston. And Serkis? Well, if he has his druthers he’ll probably be slapping on another monkey suit come Oscar night to bask in praise for his patented brand of half-acting. There are a few impressive scenes (like a climactic ape raid on the Golden Gate Bridge or the image of suburban tree lines rustling under the weight of a charging monkey brigade), but it’s nothing you’ll miss by not seeing the movie.
The film is a frustrating mess. In one instant we’re supposed to feel contempt for a bottom-line driven pharmaceutical company, then in another we’re supposed to shake our heads at Dr. Franco-stein for daring to operate outside of it. Add to all this dizziness a few half-assed inversions and citations of classic lines and scenarios from the original picture (a monkey riding a horse!) and you get what’s essentially the Monkey-ed Movies version of an already plenty monkeyed-up movie.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens Friday, August 5 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

That the closest thing you’ve probably seen to a movie from the Congo is the movie Congo works in the favour of this Congolese crime thriller. Suffused with local colour, texture, and the ba-da-bum of background drumming, Viva Riva! does a fine job dressing up what would otherwise be a pretty by-the-numbers gang war picture.
The turf being squabbled over in Viva Riva! isn’t drugs or guns, but gasoline. (An opening shot, of the camera moving past an open gascap, seems to suggest that the film is actually an Osmosis Jones–style micro-drama transpiring in the vacuum of an empty fuel tank.) Up-and-coming Angolan thief Riva (Patsha Bay Mukuna) arrives in Kinshasa with a whole truckload of stolen gas. Cue about 90 minutes of gunfights and sex scenes as our wily hero evades his former employer (Hoji Fortuna) and a local crime boss (Diplome Amekinda), whose lovely mistress-slash-femme-fatale (Manie Malone) has also landed in Riva’s cross-hairs. There’s also a sex scene steamy enough to fog up the whole theatre.
It plays out pretty by-the-book, hitting all the neo-noirish Scarface-y beats as it follows a swaggering, arrogant criminal’s nimble navigation up the ladder. But sameness isn’t necessarily a knock against it, especially for genre fans happy to see gunfire exchanged and anything at all blow up. It’s unflinching in its depiction of male-on-female violence, which jerks us back out of the film’s giddier excesses considerably. (Then again, you could say the same about a lot of the 1970s blaxploitation pictures that Viva Riva! takes its cues from, most of which are now understood as trash-cinema classics.) But when it hits its marks, Viva Riva! is a passably fun, gleefully gritty picture, and it’s interesting enough just seeing a Congolese take on the gangster drama.
Viva Riva! Opens Friday, August 5 for a limited run at the Royal Cinema (608 College Street). click here for showtimes.“>Click here for showtimes.

I’ll admit to a) being a pretty easy laugher and b) finding both Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman funny, especially in their standard configurations as suave d-bag and put-upon straight man, respectively. Given these qualifiers, the Change-Up is really, really funny, if not really, really good.
Bateman plays Dave, a hard-working lawyer and father who’s about to clinch partner status at his prestigious Atlanta law firm, straining his relationship with his wife (Leslie Mann). Reynolds is Dave’s longtime best friend, Mitch, a slacker and stoner who works as a sometimes-actor in TV commercials and “lorn” (that’s short for “light porn”) movies. After a night of heavy drinking and magic, the two find their personalities transferred to the other’s body, and living the lives they claim to covet.
Reynolds and Bateman have good fun playing the other. And though The Change-Up never reaches the masterful body-swap territory of John Woo’s singular Face/Off (in which Nic Cage does John Travolta doing Nic Cage, and vice-versa), it’s great seeing them muck about in each other’s wheelhouse. The Reynolds-Bateman’s half-assed parenting alone (“Violence solves everything!”) provides enough jokes, to say nothing of all the acrobatic swearing and projectile baby shit. Some of the more syrupy moments hit—like a scene between Mann and Reynolds-as-Bateman, or one between Alan Arkin (as Reynolds’ dad) and Bateman-as-Reynolds—but the film tries to pack in too many of these tender interludes. Sure, The Change-Up works to all the obvious conclusions (that working hard and settling down is good, but not if you work too hard or get too settled), but the way there is funny and gross enough that the tired Freaky Friday plotting seems passably enlivened.
The Change-Up opens Friday, August 5 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.