This movie is a mess. It's too mean-spirited for young children, the plot is completely lame, and the direction is incompetent. The actors do the best they can with the lousy material, but there isn't much for them. I think that the director must have thought that he was making a fast-food commercial, because he constantly includes choppy reaction shots. The worst is when the CGI ape arrives in California and the demographically balanced staff of the preserve come out to meet the truck (like a bunch of kids hearing the Good Humor chimes -- I guess they've never seen a truck before) and the monkey gets out. We jump to what seems like a dozen faces, one after another (some of which never again appear in the film), and they all look as though "it's the best chicken I've ever had". There is also a scene near the beginning of the movie where the two principal actors are "expositing" and you never see them in a two-shot. It looks as though the knucklehead didn't think things through during principal photography and then later needed to get some more footage. So you get these close-ups that jump back and forth, with the faces filling the screen so that they need to put less background in, and it's harder to see all of the continuity errors.
It's probably sad that I saw this piece of junk on video the same week that I saw "Cookie's Fortune".
It's probably sad that I saw this piece of junk on video the same week that I saw "Cookie's Fortune".