Primate review- Boring, flat and unimaginative

By Flora Irvine-Hall

Image via IGN

The creature feature is back. And not in a good way.

When I first heard about Johannes Roberts Primate, I was pretty excited. A campy, easy-to-watch creature feature with lot of gore? Count me in.

Unfortunately, this ape-centric film is rather lacklustre.

The film follows Lucy, (played by Johnny Sequoyah) who is back home visiting her beautiful Hawaiian beach house with her friends.

Lucy has been through it. Having recently lost her mother to breast cancer and having a rather strained relationship with her sister Erin and her father, she’s long overdue a nice relaxing break in the sun.

Unfortunately for Lucy, Ben is there. Ben being their pet chimp.

Lucy’s mother was a linguistics professor and had been studying how chimpanzees and humans communicated with one another. So naturally, she brought Ben home.

Lucy says that “Ben is family” and to start off with, she’s right. Ben is a super cute and super happy monkey that will have audiences questioning whether they should get a monkey.

Image via Rotten Tomatoes

But when Ben gets bitten by a wild mongoose, he contracts rabies and turns into a wild, unfeeling, unstoppable killing machine.

I wasn’t expecting anything spectacular with this film, but I was expecting to be entertained. And aside from a very funny scene with  a frat boy named Drew (played by Charlie Mann) I was pretty bored.

It doesn’t help that the characters are incredibly bland. It’s hard to root for them when they have about us much personality as a wooden spoon.

Another thing that didn’t work was the pacing. One minute Ben is a nice, sweet monkey and the next he’s a mean, evil monkey. According to the NHS, symptoms of rabies usually appear within three to twelve weeks. I think this is where the film missed a trick. Instead of Ben going completely bananas in the span of a couple of days, let the build up be more slow. Let Ben be weird, moody and unnerving. This would have built up the fear of dread and would have made for a better pay off.

One of the reasons I was excited about Primate was that I was told it was terrifying . Not to sound like a hard man (or hard woman) but the scares were minimal. It’s definitely brutal, but scary? Not so much. The Gordie scene in Nope manages to petrify  me more in  just over five minutes than Primate does in its entire run time.  

Like I said, I know this film wasn’t going to be a masterpiece, but I wished they’d explored the themes of loss and grief a lot more. Lucy and Erin’s mother is barely a footnote in the story despite being such a huge loss for the girls. They could have gone down the route of the family keeping Ben as a way to honour their mother. Perhaps Ben was already getting too big and aggressive, but they kept Ben as a way to keep their mother alive. This would have added some much needed emotional depth.

Image via The Hollywood Reporter

They also never really acknowledge the family are the ones to blame for the events of the film. Wild animals are not meant to be pets. Why not add commentary about stupid rich people trying to domesticate wild animals and turn them into pets? This was another missed opportunity..

One thing that this film does well is the gore. The blood, the guts and the OTT kills had me squirming in my seat. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to make the film anything above subpar.

Primate isn’t terrible, but it’s very average and very forgettable.