Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #180 MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate (2001)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.
Every once in while I’m struck by the fact that literally dozens of movies exist in which apes, chimpanzees and simians of all sizes behave in a humorously anthropomorphic fashion, getting up to all manner of monkey business and generally wreaking havoc.
If I wanted to, I could devote the next few years of my life to exhaustively chronicling this simian cinematic sub-genre for posterity, for humanity’s sake as well as that of my readers, in a manner not unlike The Weird Accordion to Al and The Travolta/Cage Project.
Then I come to my senses and realize that the reason that I have not embarked on such a project is because movies where monkeys engage in shenanigans are almost invariably stupid, silly nonsense for babies and while I may be an emotionally stunted man-child I pride myself on not being a stupid baby.
The problem with most monkey-based comedies is that they fucking suck. The bigger problem is the horrifying amount of animal abuse involved in terrorizing poor, helpless, innocent little chimpanzees and orangutans into hitting marks and faking human emotions.
There’s nothing funny about animal abuse. There’s also nothing funny about the “comedy” that results from pulling a Michael Cimino and waging senseless war against the animal kingdom and animal actors, as evidenced by both of the blockbuster trucker comedies Academy-Award-winning screen legend Clint Eastwood made with Clyde the Orangutan.
Watching monkey actors I can’t help but think about how one of the animal actors who very lucratively played Clyde the Orangutan in Any Which Way You Can, Buddha, was reportedly beaten to death by its trainer for stealing donuts from craft services.
Instead of scolding a phantom, invisible Barack Obama, perhaps Clint Eastwood should have spent that time at the Republican National Convention sobbingly apologizing to the ghosts of the orangutans who played Floyd for all they endured for the sake of his enrichment.
Berny, the chimpanzee portraying Jack, the eponymous skateboarding monkey at the heart of 2001’s MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate has a wonderful screen presence, sad and warm and effortlessly charismatic.
Tragically, that means that his testicles probably suffered terribly for his art, as that seems to be the horrible secret of monkey movies: forcing poor little monkeys to “act” through the ever-looming threat of testicular abuse. Seldom have so many wonderful animals had to suffer for so little, entertainment-wise.
MVP2 opens with its ragingly anthropomorphic chimp heroes, Jack and Louie, who are more human than humans, enjoying a casual life in the country with a kindly Jane Goodall type protector.
That changes when Jack is unexpectedly the final mammal chosen by the appropriately named Seattle Simians in the professional hockey draft as a Bill Veek-like stunt. Jack is supposed to be a glorified mascot designed to amuse the kiddies and intrigue the media but when the coach puts Jack in out of desperation he is surprised to discover that the over-achieving lower life form INSTANTLY BECOMES ONE OF THE GREATEST HOCKEY PLAYERS OF ALL TIME.
Oh sure, at first his teammates are a little perplexed and unamused. I know it would bring up a lot of feelings in me if a chimpanzee decided to dabble in pop culture media and instantly created something infinitely better than Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place.
Jack however earns his teammates respect and devotion by proving a consummate professional, loving family man, loyal friend and all-around mensch.
Now at this point you might be asking yourself why a movie about a skate-boarding monkey called Most Vertical Primate is doing with a hockey-themed plot.
Let’s just say that it’s a good thing that MVP2: Most Vertical Primate did not receive a gala theatrical premiere because angry audiences would have set fire to their seats and rioted once they realized that they were all the victims of a shameless and unconscionable bait and switch.
These unethical masters of deceit, these princes of lies, cynically sold MVP2: Most Vertical Primate to gullible audiences as a skateboarding monkey movie, only to deliver a second movie about a hockey-playing chimpanzee with a sideline in skateboarding.
It’s sub-titled Most Vertical Primate but that furry little fucker sure does seem to spend most of the movie defiantly horizontal, skating rings around his apoplectic human competition rather than doing wicked skateboarding tricks.
Jack doesn’t even discover the world of skateboarding until thirty-five minutes into the film and the third act reflects this weirdly bifurcated focus by hopping back and forth between the all-important skateboarding competition where our plucky orphan hero will find a sponsor, and a family, and a championship hockey game that Jack wins with a last-second goal.
I seem to recall seeing a plucky underdog win the big game at the last second before, possibly in every sports movie ever made.
To further drive home just how insultingly misleading Most Vertical Primate is, the movie ends with Jack winning MVP, for Most Valuable Player/Primate, not for Most Vertical Primate.
I understand how children deceived by this movie and the con artists who created and marketed it could grow up to not trust anyone or anything, including adults, media and the government.
Jack’s stint as the Wayne Gretzky of the monkey kingdom comes to a premature, abrupt halt when a nefarious opposing team makes it look like the heroic animal athlete bit the finger of an opposing player in a fit of animalistic rage.
It’s a set-up, of course, and a bad one. The hockey player framing Jack uses ketchup to simulate blood and doesn’t even wait until the referee and opposing team are out of earshot to begin sinisterly cackling “Heh heh heh” in appreciation of how well his evil scheme is working.
A crowd that just moments before worshipped Jack as a hero and a pioneer in the exciting world of inter-species sports turns on him instantly. They now see him as a literally sub-human monster and a menace that must be contained if not destroyed.
Jack leaves in shame and disgust and embarks him on a journey of self-discovery that eventually leads him to befriend Rob Poirier, an orphan who lives in a shack. When I was a kid and I saw a parentless child on their own in a movie or TV show I saw it as an illustration that they were independent, plucky and street smart.
Now that I am a parent, when I look at kids without moms or dads or social workers to look after them I see helpless victims who will be murdered or sex trafficked unless someone intervenes.
Thankfully Rob has an ideal inter-species big brother figure in Jack, who proves to be just as much a natural at skateboarding as he is at ice hockey, and a father figure played by Home Improvement’s Richard Karn, one of a number of vaguely familiar yet affordable faces in the cast.
Apparently a skateboarding chimpanzee just wasn’t enough of a hook or a gimmick for a Most Valuable Primate sequel. So they remade the first film, replacing college hockey with professional hockey, and clumsily shoe-horned in a skateboarding plot that doesn’t add much to the film.
A hockey-playing monkey? That shit is old news. Yawn. Even the Most Valuable Primate’s core audience of slow-witted, easily entertainment small children deserve better than this unethical exercise in rote formula and false advertising.
It’s almost as if kiddie comedies about monkeys suck by design because they’re pitched at an audience with low/no standards.
Then again, I am slated to write about Most Valuable Primate for this column as well and I will be VERY angry if it’s also misleadingly marketed and poor Jack spends most of it honing his chess game and only dabbles in hockey at the very end.
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