Stare Into The Netflix Abyss With 'MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate'

There is no question that, since their introduction in Australia, streaming video on-demand services such as Netflix and Stan have revolutionised the way a significant number of people watch TV. Not in terms of actual viewing habits, mind you – most of us have been watching what we want, when we want, for years but certainly more of us are actually doing it legally now.

However, the wide world of entertainment that has been opened up to folks Down Under in recent months, as wonderful and overdue as it is, is not without its dark side. There are corners of these various services at our disposal now that reveal the existence not only of your classic and/or cult movies and high-quality original programming such as The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Daredevil and BoJack Horseman, but cinematic embodiments of the creative abyss into which so many thespians and auteurs have stared in contemplative defeat before giving up entirely and hauling themselves and their entire fucking movie off the edge and straight into the gaping maw of sadness and obscurity below.

These are the movies that make you question how hard it can really be to get a pitch heard in Hollywood; the sort of films that make you rush to actors’ IMDb pages in disbelief despite having just looked at a very real poster featuring Christian Slater as an Old West outlaw in a movie made in the Year Of Our Lord two-thousand-and-freaking-twelve (oh, we’ll get to that one eventually); the kind of entertainment that encourages you to step back, take a hard look at yourself, and ask: ‘...Why am I paying for this, again?’

There are a lot of them, too; so, each fortnight here, alongside general reviews and commentary on our local stream offerings, I’ll be looking at some of the nightmare films needlessly filling out our SVOD services’ storage space, starting with MVP 2: Most Vertical Primate (2001, Netflix), on no grounds other than it was a suggested title on my profile for some reason and I just can’t say no to a good, old-fashioned hate-watch when it’s so graciously dumped in my lap. 

There is a shipload wrong with MVP 2, and it’s stuff that goes well beyond the leeway for forgiveness that one generally applies to kids’ films when you’re decades too old to even graze the target demographic’s edges. For starters, the movie – which is, as you might have guessed, a sequel to the equally inexplicable MVP: Most Valuable Primate – rather arrogantly assumes its viewers have seen the original, which created all kinds of narrative problems from the get-go.

If you’ve seen Most Valuable Primate, then you come to MVP 2 armed with the knowledge that the protagonist, Jack the Chimpanzee, learnt how to play ice hockey in the previous chapter, and has an existing affinity for the sport. If you, like me, have not seen MVP and you were drawn to this film because of the hilarious-looking monkey nailing SICK AIR on the poster, you come into this film expecting Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater meets Dunston Checks In and instead see two fully clothed chimpanzees playing hockey in the street before ending up at a professional ice hockey match within the first 20 minutes or so, with no narrative or other indication as to what the fuck is even happening in this movie that you swore was going to be about skateboarding.

Also, at no stage in this movie – or, presumably, its predecessor – does anybody react with anything but utter indifference to the presence of chimpanzees on professional sports teams. Maybe it got sorted out back in Most Valuable Primate but, certainly by the time MVP 2 rolls around, his carers basically treat him like a human child, keeping him in clothes and a house and allowing him to pursue team sports, which he does when he gets invited to play with the Seattle Simians ice hockey team. Nobody questions Jack’s place on the Seattle Simians despite his inability to speak a human language, receive a salary, pay taxes, and consent to risk waivers – until he’s set up by the competition, the Los Angeles Carjackers, to make it look like he took a bite out of someone, and Jack leaves the team in shame, assuming that chimpanzees can feel shame.

And then, just like that, just as I was getting super-invested in Jack’s fledgling career as a professional ice-hockey player, the movie remembers that it promised skateboarding in a pretty big way, and utilises the chimp’s unjust ejection from the Simians as a means to introduce him to the streets, where he meets and befriends a runaway by the name of Ben. A relatively stupid plotline, about a skating competition for whatever exact amount of money Ben needs, takes over from here out, punctuated by the unlikely blossoming of boy-and-monkey best-friendship between Jack and Ben, Jack’s freakish discovery that he can skateboard, and the lamentable presence of Bob Burnquist, who really had to be going through a rough patch to have agreed to have his name associated with this piece of candy-coated trash.

In fact, he doesn't just appear in the movie — he took time out for the VHS release to do a little post-credits behind-the-scenes featurette about how excited he was to have the opportunity to skate with a chimp. Seriously, he used the word "excited", and calls the script "awesome", presumably so that the film crew would feed him before sending him back to his box-tent for the night. That is rough for Bob Burnquist. Also, he is the only human party in this film whose name I actually remember or care about, which is probably fortunate for everyone else involved.

Amid all this, the hockey storyline isn't dropped entirely, which is actually pretty surprising considering the overall quality of storytelling coughed up over the past hour and a half or so. Jack returns to the Simians — who have been limping along using Jack's no-talent brother Louie as a stand-in for their wayward player, instead of just bumping up one of the very human subs that has probably been slogging their guts out for the team for years before these stupid fucking monkeys showed up — after helping Ben win his skateboarding competition and helps them win their championship too, because one victory simply wouldn't have been enough for this attention-seeking chimpanzee, who is apparently simultaneously both preternaturally talented and yet a total run-of-the-mill fixture as far as an increasing number of sporting communities are concerned.

And that’s possibly where MVP 2, and presumably its predecessor, and sequel – Most Xtreme Primate – really gets frustratingly confusing in terms of the world it has spent so little effort building: each movie appears to treat the discovery that Jack can play hockey, or skateboard, or snowboard, or whatever, as this amazing thing, and everyone’s all astounded and impressed by it... for like five minutes, until it rescinds back to apparently being a normal enough development that it’s perfectly acceptable, nigh unremarkable, for elite athletes to be competing next to a chimp, despite the devastating implication that carries for extreme sportspeople everywhere.