Project X 2005 Horror Movie Review

Matthew Broderick, in one of his first grownup roles after years of playing teen heroes, stars as an air force foul-up, a pilot who, as punishment, is assigned to care for the chimps in military medical experiments. He’s indignant at first but gradually warms up to his simian charges (who wouldn’t?). The more time he spends with them, the more he realizes just what thinking, feeling creatures they are—which sticks him squarely in the center of a moral dilemma when he realizes that the outcome of the experiments involves putting all the chimps to sleep. Director Jonathan Kaplan, no stranger to ethically complex melodrama, gives what might otherwise be a predictable tale a jolt of both adrenaline and real emotion—and it doesn’t hurt that most of his actors are lovable scene-stealers. —Marshall Fine