It’s not Mimic

It’s never a good sign when you sit down to watch a movie and then, several minutes in, discover you’re actually watching an entirely different movie to the one you were thinking of. Sometimes things just blur together and get mixed up in the great pop cultural pond we all, to some extent, swim in. Mind you, sometimes film-makers hardly seem to be doing themselves any favours.

Peter Hyams’ The Relic opens with some South American tribespeople doing their ritual thing, while being observed by a concerned-looking foreign anthropologist. He is John Whitney (Lewis van Bergen), and after the tribe feed him their special sauce and show him an interesting-looking statue Whitney becomes rather agitated and heads for the docks, where his various finds and samples are being loaded for shipment back to the USA. But there has been a mix-up, leaving him in apparent despair…

Hmmm, all very ominous, and when the ship arrives in the port of Chicago six weeks later the police are bemused to find that the entire crew seems to have disappeared. Closer investigations led by boss cop D’Agosta (Tom Sizemore) uncover a few dismembered corpses and severed heads floating in dingy recesses of the ship. As is apparently SOP, the Chicago PD dismisses this as some kind of drug-related incident. (No wonder South American people get so annoyed about their continent always being stereotyped as a lawless gang-ridden hell.)

Yet another week goes by and we finally arrive at the setting for most of the rest of the movie: the Chicago Museum of Natural History, which employed Whitney. We meet whip-smart evolutionary biologist Margo (Penelope Ann Miller), who, this being a Hollywood movie, looks like a model, and various other characters about the place. One of them is a crusty but lovable old scientist played by James Whitmore, but if he has indeed been cast just as a call-back to Them! it’s not dwelt on at too great a length. Whitney’s boxes have finally arrived but just seem to be full of funny leaves and bits of a broken statue.

Then, and you might think about time too for a lot of setting-things-up has gone on, one of the night security guards at the museum is discovered with his head ripped off and the brain inelegantly extracted and partly devoured. Even in Chicago this is not normal, and D’Agosta quickly spots a connection with what happened on the ship. The museum is locked down and a search launched – but the board of the place have powerful friends and want it reopened in a hurry, mainly because they are having a gala to celebrate the launch of a new exhibition and the great and the good of the city will be there. Can the police guarantee their safety with a brutal, possibly inhuman killer lurking somewhere on the premises? (Clue: no.)

I have to confess, I only watched The Relic because it was on a free streaming site and because Guillermo del Toro and Mira Sorvino are people who tend to do interesting work. Hang on, A, you may be saying to your screen, what the hell have Guillermo del Toro and Mira Sorvino got to do with any of this? A very good and fair point. Could it possibly be that I have got the 1997 monster movie The Relic, directed by Hyams and starring Miller, mixed up in my head with the 1997 monster movie Mimic, directed by del Toro and starring Sorvino? It would explain why I was sort of expecting giant beetles which never really appeared, but beyond this I will maintain a dignified silence.

Mind you, The Relic is fairly generic stuff even in its better moments: I kept having flashbacks to other movies like Arachnophobia and Q: The Winged Serpent (too many severed heads will have that effect on a person) – also, and this may sound weird, films like The Poseidon Adventure. One of the things that keeps The Relic from being an entirely formulaic monster mash is that it attempts a rather unexpected genre fusion with the classic disaster movie formula – it’s not just about a brain-eating monster on the loose in a big museum. It’s about a brain-eating monster on the loose in a big museum during a ritzy opening gala with various important and wealthy people on the premises, for whom being devoured is not normal.

And to be fair, once the movie reaches this point, it does acquire a certain sort of energy and interest, and it perks up a good deal. The problem is that this point arrives about 60% of the way through the movie. Can you imagine what Die Hard would have been like if the terrorists had only arrived 60% of the way through? Or The Thing, if the dog had only turned into an alien well into the second half of the movie? Perhaps you begin to see the problem.

The thing about The Relic is while it does have a reasonably good monster design, decent performances and a script with moments of inventiveness and wit, there’s something fundamentally cack-handed about the script. The pacing, structure, and exposition are all a bit fluffed, and it may just be that the film is trying a bit too hard to be clever. Most monster films like this one just start off with someone finding an egg somewhere remote, but The Relic is all over the place talking about genetics and viruses and hormones and the hypothalamic region and tribal customs. Is it all strictly necessary for a film in which the sweet spot is watching anonymous actors have their skulls munched upon? If it is, then The Relic doesn’t do a good enough job of convincing me of that.

You know, I like The X Files and I like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which are really the things that the early sections of The Relic reminded of the most – but in the end I didn’t really like it as much as either of those. The problem in the end is that a lot of it feels so generic and written-by-formula that it’s almost stale, while its innovations just end up a bit confusing and maybe even a bit silly. The odd good moment, but I’m betting that Mimic must be at least a bit better than this.