shark-43

MONKEY BUSINESS is a fun boat ride - this is one of the best Marx Brothers movies they made. Pure anarchy - they disrupt everything - all the stodginess and entitlement of a luxury cruise is disrupted by the 4 stowaways - Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo & Chico - plus a terrific supporting cast of Tom Kennedy and the great Thelma Todd. There is top notch slapstick & a million fast jokes. Thelma Todd is wonderful as the gangster Alky Briggs' bored wife - Todd will work with many of the great comedy teams before her untimely death at the age of 29. There are so many hilarious scenes in this film but the one where they are trying to get off the ship using Maurice Chevalier's stolen passport is an absolute comedy classic!!

As others have said on here, there are many of us who enjoy "weird movies" but they still need to make some sort of sense - this script is a mess - bits & pieces of mad scientist movies from the 1950's, body modification, broken families, suffering teenager, etc. Throw them all in a blender - add a strong lead performance from Hunter Schafer and it still doesn't work. I am a big fan of Dan Stevens - he has terrific range as an actor - in fact, if you want to watch a truly creepy, dark film with a great Dan Stevens performance, watch FRESH - but this truly doesn't make sense - he has this resort as a nature preserve so he can - what? Create bird women hybrids that can screech and - what?? Maybe I need to be on the same drugs and/or bird seed the filmmaker was on. It just gets more and more confusing as it goes along and when Dan Stevens tried to explain his plan, people in the theatre around me were laughing or yawning. No one cared. It is cuckoo. And not even for Cocoa Puffs! Yes, if he was trying to turn them into the Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs Bird, THEN you got something!!!

I am fan of crime writer James Lee Burke AND Alec Baldwin, so it is so unfortunate that none of this works as a film. Very talented people involved, pretty good cast (even though when you think hot sexy New Orleans stripper, you dont think Mary Stuart Masterson) the film just meanders along, scene by scene but there's no life to it. The action is flat, the dialogue seems forced, all the bars are "movie" bars, it all feels artificial. I haven't seen the Tommy Lee Jones film where he also plays Robicheaux but I want to. This was a strange period for Baldwin, they were desperately trying to make him a leading man but he truly blossomed when he got a little heavy and embraced being a terrific character actor, which he always was, despite the chiseled looks and blue eyes. If you want to see a young Alec Baldwin in a. Good crime flick, just watch MIAMI BLUES.