So, Herk and Karen and Peter and Amy–consider the possibilities. Which writer John Patrick Shanley (“Moonstruck”), adapting Michael Criehton’s 1980 best seller, does, along with the director-producer team Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, longtime colleagues of Steven Spielberg’s. Crichton-Spielberg-Kennedy did “Jurassic Park,” the King Solomon’s mine of movies. “Congo” is not in that league. Behind the computers, the satellites, the lasers and the special effects that make the volcano erupt and the lost city of Zinj get lost again, lurk all the African cliches. The old headhunters are now bribe taking wise guys in the uniforms of authoritarian regimes. A giant hippo attacks the expedition’s raft, just like the brontosaurusin “King Kong.” The leech that latches onto Peter’s genitalia is a postmodernizing of the leeches chomping on Humphrey Bogart in “The African Queen.”
As the expedition hacks its way deep into the heart of schlockness, the fun is almost all technical. Tarzan’s cute screechy chimp is replaced by the much cuter Amy, who has been taught sign language and wears a computerized glove that converts her signs into a synthesized voice. Amy is played by a performer wearing an ape suit, while off-screen technicians control her facial expressions through the electronic puppetry called animatronics, the work of the wizardly Stan Winston.
All the techno-wizardry pays limited thrill dividends. Despite the agreeable ensemble (notably “Ghostbusters’s” Ernie Hudson as a takeoff on the classic white hunter) the movie suffers from the lack of a hero figure, an Indiana Jones. The real star is Amy. See her belt back a martini. Watch her cuddle with nerdy Peter, in the movie’s strongest emotional relationship. Gasp as the simian teeny-bopper singlehandedly stops a horde of bloodthirsty mutant gray gorillas from dismantling Peter. At the end, after Amy sadly toddles off into the bush, Peter mistily sniffs a flower she’s given him. This bodes no good for the budding romance between Peter and Karen. You know the old song: “Once in love with Amy, always in love with Amy.”
