Based on a short story by Stephen King, the interesting premise of The Monkey is quickly backed up by a solid origin story featuring twins Hal and Bill (Christian Convery with the younger version and later on Theo James with the elder version), two characters who cannot get along with each other. The basic dynamics of their relationship remains strained – Hal is the subdued douchebag, and Bill is the  bullying sibling preferring to stay in solitude. The origin story doubles up for ‘The Monkey’ as well, a harmless but terrifyingly scary toy that doubles up as a killing machine when key-ed into. In a way, The Monkey is a mashup of Hal and Bill with the best and the worst traits wrapped into a toy – when it us subdued, it is more like Hal, when key-ed into, the rupturing sound of the drums spells doom for a random character around then. In a way, this Yin and Yang trait of the monkey can be extended in the form of life and death too – you enjoy life to the fullest when you can, for death will eventually find a way to get you in a classic rendition to the philosophy presented in the Final Destination franchise.

The drama works its way and scores heavily with its shock value. And the shock value in this case is extended through the variety of deaths around the central characters. If it is Hal and Bill’s baby sitter who gets accidently sliced at a restaurant, or even their mother, who unusually dies of aneurysm, the deaths remain violently shocking, and brutally hilarious. And so, this particular trait of the film The Monkey, sets it apart from the tone of the Final Destination franchise – the latter thrived on the intrigue in the drama, the former thrives on the light-hearted tone of brutality, a unique form of black comedy that is entertaining and fun to witness.

The issue that I had with the film wasn’t the shocking elements, that doubled up tremendously as a concept. It was more on the lines of being content with its surface-level treatment as far as the writing was concerned, that didn’t elevate the drama beyond its original concept. For instance, the character dynamics itself felt frivolous to a point that I couldn’t care less about who has died or who has lived to fight another day in the film. And I call this a flaw because two of the late twists in the film were modelled around these dynamics, and for them to work, the dynamics needed a solid payoff which wasn’t exactly the case. Even as the drama tips past the halfway mark, there is a considerable lag in the screenplay as well, that just loses a little bit of steam in trying to allow the viewers space to realign with the passage of time. The focus isn’t much on yhe whereabouts of the monkey but on a personal dynamic even as the writing threatens to enter a convenient space with a parallel plot-point. Again, the personal dynamics between Hal and his son wasn’t exactly the contributing factor in the drama from an emotional stand-point that could have had a late payoff.

The allegory of life and death though worked well from a concept point of view. The deaths continued to be a blast, literally and figuratively to the point that most of the innovation in the writing emerged from these situations. So you have a character being trampled to pulp by horses, another one explodes in a pool after the water is electrified, elsewhere a shotgun blows the head of a character from a short range – I can go on and on, but it is more fun watching them rather than reading about them. That said, the personal motivations of a character in hoping for a revenge was a far-fetched concept that didn’t land for me, thereby reducing the drama to the surface. The final representation of death through the Pale Horseman was an interesting one, that allowed the eventual messaging in the drama to land well. And I so wished that the screenplay would have offered more on this line, given that the revenge plot-point was so lame! But the screenplay is still fun to watch and amplifies the shock values in the drama.