At The Movies

Ebert: Hello, welcome back to At The Movies, I'm Roger Ebert and with me as always is Richard Roeper.

Roeper: Jo Jo the Portrait of a Monkeyboy Sidekick is, well... it's a movie, I guess, about a comedy relief sidekick monkeyboy who meets his untimely demise when his face is disintegrated in an Intergalactic Gladiator arena. After the character’s introduction and about fifteen minutes of absolutely nothing, the movie follows his humble beginnings and his training as a sidekick. He then becomes the sidekick to a hero from Earth until his untimely death. Jo Jo the Monkeyboy, just doesn’t work, though. If I’m supposed to relate to this character, I don’t. I can’t root for him, he just doesn’t work and neither does the movie.

Ebert: I have to disagree, Richard. Jo Jo worked for me and it worked on several levels.

Roeper: Really?

Ebert: Sure, haven’t you ever wondered what it’s like for the sidekick? Movies are always about heroes, but this lets us see things from the other guy’s point of view. I really felt for him when his face got disintegrated.

Roeper: You’re kidding, right? This was bad, it had wooden acting, poor direction, and it ripped off a couple dozen other, better movies.

Ebert: I like to think they were homages.

Roeper: What?

Ebert: Homages. The writer did a great job here nodding his cap to all of the movies before.

Roeper: Did you see who wrote the movie?

Ebert: Of course, Jo Jo the Monkeyboy Sr. Obviously, he wrote this in memory of his son. Having his son die tragically like that must have been terrible for Jo Jo Sr.

Roeper: You know, that’s another thing. This character is pretty inconsistent. He’s surviving car crashes and getting launched out of cannons. He even gets up and walks away from being inside a starship’s reactor core. But then his face gets disintegrated. How come he didn’t survive that?

Ebert: Well, do you think you could survive that?

Roeper: I’m not a monkeyboy.

Ebert: Exactly.

Roper: Exactly what? That doesn’t make any sense.

Ebert: I think that’s supposed to be the point. This character is a classic fish out of water bouncing around on screen. He’s crazy, but just crazy enough to be likeable.

Roeper: That’s another thing. What the heck is a monkeyboy anyway? He looks like neither a monkey nor a boy.

Ebert: He’s from planet Monkekbok.

Roeper: OK, OK. It doesn’t matter. I say that it’s a terrible story with unbelievable characters, Uwe Boll and Michael Bay on their worst days couldn’t come up with something as bad as this. Thumbs down from me.

Ebert: I say thumbs up, it was a little bit different, it was sad, it had a lot of stuff you don’t see in movies these days.

Roeper: So you’re giving it thumbs up.

Ebert: Seriously.

Ebert: Yep.

Roeper: Of all the movies that someone can see this week, you recommend this one above all others?

Ebert: ………………………………….No no, I can’t! This was a horrible movie! This was a horrible, terrible, awful movie! I hated, hated, hated this monstrosity of mediocrity. Thumbs down from me, two thumbs down. In fact, I wish that I were a monkeyboy so I could give it 4 or 5 thumbs downs.

Roeper: So there you have it, it was a bad movie.

Ebert: Very bad.