Directed By Joseph Kahn

Starring – Brandon Routh, Mena Suvari, Malina Pauli Weissman

The Plot – Science teacher Hank’s (Routh) life changes when he reconnects with his first love (Suvari) and suspects a new student (Weissman) is his daughter, all while facing an alien threat in their town.

Rated R for adult language and brutal sequences involving violence and gore

Joseph Kahn’s ICK / Official Trailer / In Theaters July 27

POSITIVES

If you grew up during the early 2000’s, at the height of pop punk music, there’s a good chance that you will find “Ick” irresistibly charming, especially with its collection of timely favorites meant to highlight the age with youthful exuberance. While the song selections themselves don’t exactly cater lyrically to the context they’re used in the scene, they do infuse Kahn’s brand of energetically feverish direction with the kind of uplifting energy that does work surprisingly well alongside the visuals of what we’re being shown, particularly once the Ick attacks and starts taking over the town. Between songs from All-American Rejects, Paramore, Blink 182, and even Creed, there’s proof in the audible pudding that the production invested some serious dough into reserving the rights for one of the year’s best collective soundtracks, and considering Kahn himself is a music video director turned filmmaker, the opportunity feels like a kid assembling a mix to articulate the intended age, giving a lot of toe-tapping infectiousness to the audience in its seamless stroll down memory lane. In addition to the soundtrack, the ensemble is having the time of their lives partaking in the campy shenanigans of what the opportunity entails, with meaningful work from Brandon Routh, who once again commands the screen with so much charm and radiant charisma that effortlessly bleeds big character status. Routh seems right at home with the exaggerated emphasis of the various deliveries that rides a wave of tempo throughout the various interactions, but ideally it’s the heart that he deposits to the character that stands as the lone emotionality that I experienced throughout the engagement, allowing Brandon a bountiful assist to feel like the movie’s most valuable player, who will likely make or break audience expectations in garnering so much of the story’s focus. However, the special effects are probably the movie’s single biggest strength, with the Ick itself being manifested by computer generated properties that don’t look bad for a movie so obviously made on the cheap with its contrasting visuals. The effects themselves aren’t exactly overwhelming with believability in textures, but the artistic impulse to shift the movie’s color grading to a far more grainy and staticky surrounding help to hide the transparencies of its artificiality, all the while presenting an update to the blob concept that Kahn grew up idolizing. Lastly, while the storytelling itself leaves slightly more to be desired in both flat characterization and a complete lack of urgency, there is a particular aforementioned arc pertaining to the DNA legitimacy of Routh being Weissman’s father that did effectively interest me, even if the resolution will inevitably cast a great divide among the audience. Throughout the film, we’re kind of left open-ended whether she is in fact his daughter, and aside from utilizing some stakes to their individualized arc among the fray, it’s answered in a way during the film’s ending that will inspire debates among its audience, but if people are talking about the movie, it can never be a bad thing, especially alongside some of the greatest debates in film that don’t exactly receive 100% clarity.

NEGATIVES

Every year, I describe a kids movie as being “Overly sugary and loudly obnoxious”, and if you’re searching for the adult version of such a labeling, look no further than “Ick”, a horror comedy hybrid that constantly annoyed me with its brand of compromising filmmaking. For starters, the atmosphere is only attained halfway, as the humor does attain a couple of noteworthy laughs, mostly in the depths of its long-winded and high syllable vocabulary ushered in commandingly from its youthful ensemble, however the movie’s horror is undercooked behind every turn, with a complete absence of tension or suspense that grows these sequences with patience, a fact never present in any of Kahn’s direction. At 86 meager minutes, the script feels like it can’t be bothered to slow down and build a dynamic among its characters, nor can Kahn enact these sequences with any kind of prolonged panache in ways that leaves audiences on the edge of their seats, and the results just underscore the stakes and circumstances in ways that constantly lack a connective tissue to the sensibilities of our interpretation, leaving this feeling like a film that is overly dominant on the comedy, despite Kahn himself constantly prescribing in interviews and featurettes that the movie takes him back to the times when he was terrified watching horror movies as a kid. On top of this, the editing’s influence can be felt in more ways than one, but particularly in the glaring continuity errors to both character emotions from scene to scene, as well as their placements in the previous shot. If you’re approaching this film at face value, you will leave the movie feeling like these kids can teleport, based on their ability to be two places at once, during the plotting of this movie’s sequencing, and it creates this disorienting effect to the storytelling that is so obviously not intentional, making it feel like some noteworthy scenes are missing from the finished cut, which could’ve helped alleviate the glaring issues with consistency. If this didn’t eviscerate my investment in attempting to maintain what’s transpiring, the obnoxious characters certainly did, especially considering they become a paranoid “Type” by the movie’s midway point, where they’re all of a sudden hawking traditionalism, while shuffling off the cares and concerns of this Ick takeover as pure government paranoia. While the intention is obvious in drawing a clever parallel between the characters in this film and the people who refused to take caution during the Covid-19 pandemic, it doesn’t make them any easier to invest in, especially in the enormous plot hole of them going back to their lives after one Ick attack already left a couple of their citizens dead from gruesome attacks. This isn’t just for the collective extras, as even the main leads such as the mother and daughter combination of Suvari and Weissman conjured two rudely conceited and often times contradicting characters whom we grow to be unfortunately saddled with, throughout a majority of the film’s runtime, and while Weissman’s character eventually evolves once her eyes are open, Weissman still persists with a condescending abrasiveness to her deliveries that makes her incredibly difficult to empathize with, leaving Routh as the only morally credible character among a community of morons and crude insulters that had me wondering if I should be supporting the deconstructive efforts of the titular antagonists. Finally, even the film’s greatest strengths serve as an unforeseen weakness to the film’s foundation, with the overhead soundtrack frequently manifested with an ear-shattering volume that overrides the clarity of character dialogue. When it happens during the backstory exposition of the film’s first couple of opening scenes, it’s fine, as the visuals are meant to illustrate everything we’re supposed to know about these characters, almost in a music video style of rendering, however when it comes to vital moments in the constructs of the movie’s momentum, it becomes a painful intrusion that makes the exposition a chore to coherently interpret, where the song selections become the primary importance to Kahn’s direction, at the cost of the film’s quality.

OVERALL
“Ick” is the perfect one word summary for Joseph Kahn’s horror comedy hybrid of a creature feature, which exchanges palpable frights and underlining suspense for music video style imagery and abrasiveness that grates on your nerves like an embarrassing mixtape from yesterday that you stumble across and play for laughs. While the film does exact some fun in the exaggerated emphasis of the various deliveries, and buckets of artificial blood throughout some solid special effects work, even Superman in the lead isn’t enough to effectively save it, leaving a blob of a blunder for Kahn and company, as the Fathom Events route will thankfully obscure it from most mainstream audiences

My Grade: 5.3 or D