A polite way to describe the films of Terry Gilliam is to call them maximalist. A more accurate description might compare them to a hungry teenager overloading a dinner plate at his first open buffet. If only someone had told him you can go back for a second plate if you’re still hungry. This one, philosophical future preposterous Sci-Fi, comes off better than most, it certainly did commercially. Bruce Willis is the time-traveling guinea-pig for a group of experts trying to figure out the mystery of the 12 Monkeys, a gaggle of infectious primates who unleashed a plague, killing about 5 billion Earthlings. Unfortunately for Willis, time coordinates not always on-target for the correct year to find out about the deadly man-made monkey virus and bring the info back-to-the-future. Christopher Plummer and lunatic son Brad Pitt keep popping up at various landing points, as does helpmate Madeleine Stowe. But don’t sweat the big stuff, the whole shebang is a shaggy-dog story (oops, shaggy-dog tragedy) with a ‘red herring’ not as a wrong turn, but as solution. Brad Pitt nearly steals the pic with his escalating rants of insanity, letting his inner Gene Wilder out. (If only he didn’t pull the same stunt every time he comes on screen.) And Gilliam’s big sentimental finish? Indefensible.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: At one point in the ‘present,’ Willis & Stowe go to the movies to watch VERTIGO and THE BIRDS at an Alfred Hitchcock retro screening. Later, Gilliam riffs on VERTIGO story beats. It adds little to the film, but does offer a chance to see how much available prints at the time needed the major restoration (largely overseen by Robert Gitt) it got for it’s successful re-release a year later in 1996.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Gilliam credits Chris Marker’s half-hour short, LA JETÉE/’62 as source, probably good advice.
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