Butler's Cinema Scene

“RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES” My rating: C (Opens wide on Aug. 5)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

At about the one-hour-and-20-minute mark the simian protagonists of “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” rebel against their human captors/tormentors and run amuck in San Francisco. And for a few moments this moribund movie comes to life.

Getting to that point, though, is a real slog.

This prequel, which purports to show how those chimps, gorillas and orangutans in the original “Planet of the Apes” came to rule over humans, is sort of like a rejected Dickens novel. Instead of a plucky young human protagonist we have Caesar, an animated chimp acted by Andy Serkis (Gollum of the “LOTR” franchise) and made flesh — er, pixels — through the wonders of motion capture technology. In this twist on a Victorian heartwrencher poor Caesar is orphaned as a newborn when all the research chimps in a big drug lab are “put down” because of an experiment gone bad. But Caesar inherited from his mama the benefits of the genetic manipulation she underwent.

He grows up in the home of a kindly scientist (James Franco), taught as if he were human and exhibiting enhanced intelligence to match the physical prowess exhibited by all members of his species.

Alas, Caesar runs afoul of a bullish neighbor and by court order is sent to a primate refuge where he meets others of his kind for the first time (they’re not smart like him…they’re just animals) and is tormented by a sadistic keeper (Tom Felton, late of the “Harry Potter” movies).

But you can’t keep a good ape down. Caesar finds a way to break out of the refuge, get into the lab where the magic serum is kept, deliver a dose to his hairy comrades, and before you can say enhanced intelligence the newly-brainy apes are getting even with humankind.

It sounds like a pretty good yarn, and it might have been if director Rupert Wyatt (of the prison break film “The Escapist”)  and writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver had given us a character — just one — that we could believe in.

But Franco is a cipher here; ditto for Freda Pinto (“Slumdog Millionaire”) as his veterinarian girlfriend. They’re as colorless as drinking water.

John Lithgow is OK as Franco’s dad — an Alzheimer’s patient who improves briefly when given the same genetic cocktail that’s added IQ points to the chimps. Brian Cox doesn’t get to do much as the guy who runs the primate refuge.

The best performance here is Serkis’s…but even that has its iffy moments.

Serkis is a skilled physical actor and he gets the monkey mannerisms down just fine. (He had a dry run of sorts playing the title character in Peter Jackson’s “King Kong.”) But the animation of Caesar’s face worked for me only half the time. Too often it had the artificial, unconvincing look of the children in “Polar Express.”

The action scenes, on the other hand, are the movie’s saving grace, especially a big interspecies rumble on the Golden Gate Bridge. “Rise…” has a couple of comic references to the Charleton Heston epic that started the whole thing. And it might have been touching and thought-provoking…but, no, it’s just a summer movie. If you really want to learn something about chimps in captivity, check out the current documentary “Project Nim.”

| Robert W. Butler