Seven long years have passed, and since then, Joseph Kahn has not made another movie, until then, Bodied: a controversial dark comic film about a liberal white kid who accidentally turns into an authentic battle rap contender. It’s unsettling how Bodied has managed to poke fun at various aspects of culture when it comes to wokeness several years ahead of its time. Kahn’s latest offering Ick is an oddity in itself in that it looks back to the early days of the music television instead of the current active era Kahn himself had perfected as the director of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” and Eminem’s “Without Me.”
Brandon Routh plays Hank Wallace, the eponymous character in Ick, a typical high school quarterback who goes about with his ring-tailed cheerleader Staci who happens to be a gorgeous lady. In this case, Staci is a properly cast Mena Suvari. He has aspirations to leave this small, boring place and get into the big game. Business is all, until an unfortunate accident occurs, an injury that ends Hank’s promising career on the pitch while combating a troublesome hose type creatures called the Ick by the local inhabitants. Soon enough Hank’s college loan deal goes down the drain, his girlfriend is lost then finally strolls into the bottle. All this is made clear to the audience in a cut to multimedia montage that Kahn is known for.
Another montage presents the next sequence where Hank is in a different time and age being a janitor in his former high school and studying in the evening for the teacher’s degree in science. On the one hand, Staci is delighted to be married to Ted Kim (Peter Wong), a real estate partner who appears to be the father of their teenage daughter Grace (Malina Pauli Weissman) although this is unverified. For instance, Staci and Hank has some romance about a week or nine months before Gracie was conceived and the dynamics of child and
the relationship possibilities between Hank and his potential daughter provides Ick with a strong narrative anchor for the subsequent sci-fi insanity. Picnic residents for years and Ick have learned to live with which appears less like a parasite and more like the symbiote of venom, a body snatcher when it comes to its intervals of quick growth, a body snatcher and suddenly. Hank is the only one who can protect the town – and save his potentially lost child? – from destruction.
Kahn said that in making his new film, he wanted to create something that he could share with his daughter, who is preteen. Ick fits the bill better than most other efforts at ferrying families along the wider genre spectrum out there. For one, it does not have the syrupy feel of most kid-friendly films. It also, quite surprisingly, does make people laugh without pretension or attempts at being intelligent in its humor. While Ick can be seen in a fun light as a clever stand-in for the frustrations of young adults who have no option but to remain in their villages after graduation, it’s not condescending or paternalistic in any way.
Kahn freshens up the hackneyed vogue of teen awkwardness – there is a loveable demure kid in the goth band, a handsome lad who uses wokeness for intercourse, a sullen creative anti social, and Grace of course as the relatable miserable lead. Bound at the center of it is Brandon Routh, who plays the male working class boy next door hero effectively and quite effortlessly. His role in Ick is such that you can compare his star quality to that of Bruce Campbell or John Ritter. He has that classic heartthrob charm that makes him irresistible.
When you begin hearing the songs, you’ll remember they are either the big pop-punk hits of the time or more usually, big pop-punk hits: Fall Out Boy, Dashboard Confessional, Fountains of Wayne (you can’t have a character called Staci and not have “Stacy’s Mom” in it), The Plain White Ts and of course, Creed hoping to get a more amusing, confusing needle-drop. Most amusingly, and likely to have the most effect on millennials, will be a role from former MTV presenter Carson Daly who appears as an Alex Jones-like character full of absurd Ick related theories.
Think of an Ick or, if you will, a late 90s-early 00s MTV with live actors and a plot based on junji ito’s inspiration. The animations needs more straightening and editing – which is rather fast in the first half and boring in the second half before picking up the pace and synchronizing in the second half – also more work could have done here. All in all, there are still no boring moments in Ick which can be defined as using an old classic idea and updating it, before jumping into the time machine and sending it back to the year 2006.
This is, I think, his specialty as a filmmaker, Joseph Kahn never ceases to amaze. His feature debut came in 2004 with Torque, an action movie starring Martin Henderson and Ice Cube, in which Kahn played an active role behind the camera. Seven years later, Kahn cut loose with Detention, R rated sci-fi slasher comedy with Josh Hutcherson – the high school teens who have to travel in time to stop a movie serial killer-copycat from killing. A 2015 scifi-horror detention proved to be both too late to join the postmodern horror wave and way too early for the overdue renaissance of similar ideas, not to mention how slightly forward-thinking it was given the current trend of pervasive multiverse’s in the Holywood. And in 2017, Kahn made Bodied. It was a little amazing but in the good way looking back at his former features.
Thus, in Ick, Kahn remains as unpredictable and original as ever. In good time, one hopes, this one will get an audience. This area will be kept for more details with respect to the release of the film.
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