Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie is a home-run. The best Monk yet in fact. It retains the broad, schmaltzy tone that made the long-running series so appealing as whole-family entertainment, but it expands on the tragic underpinning of Adrian Monk. More than a straight-to-streaming reboot to please shareholders, it’s a film trying to be about something, and what’s most surprising is how well it succeeds.
Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk in MR. MONK’S LAST CASE: A MONK MOVIE. Photo Credit: Steve Wilkie/PEACOCK. Photo courtesy of PEACOCK.
During the 2020 outcry over the murder of George Floyd and the resulting cultural focus on copaganda in media, the cop show, the weekly procedural, was forced to choose between re-evaluation or a doubling down on the status quo. Famously, the NBC sitcom Brooklyn 99 promised to make its final season about the issues of the day and to speak to the moment. The result was an incredibly mixed bag, a corporate product greenwashing its history, clamoring for both a laugh and rallying cry while polishing the boots of the NYPD with a rainbow flag. It’s aged poorly and rapidly. Even the show’s cultural risks, such as the active shooter episode, seem rotten in the face of last year’s Uvalde shooting. So, how does Monk return to our new world? By Fletch-ifying the world of Monk.
“Do you think they did me justice?” “Do you deserve justice?”
The return to Monk is more surreal, more absurd, and more lampooning in its cultural observations. The characters of the cast are, by and large, no longer cops within reason of where the show left off. No longer a man of the blue wall, but of reputation, Monk falls into the realm of a half-gentleman-detective, half-bumbling weirdo familiar to readers of Fletch novels or viewers of the recent Poker Face (2022—). Not only is this a great evolution of the character for the modern day, but a great choice for the transition to feature films, allowing for a serious character study. By the time the film hits the 50-minute mark, the Fletch-ification of Adrian Monk is complete, and the film, already jogging at a pretty good pace, takes off at a sprint.
No longer erroneously painted as the poster boy of OCD, but instead as an “unprecedented” combination of mental ills, Mr. Monk is a man trapped in the past, facing our present and future. The details of this final case are best kept as a surprise, but the story does pit Monk against a real villain, Rick Eden, played by James Purefoy (Rome, The Following). Purefoy’s performance is adequate, but it’s the structure underneath the character that’s so good. Eden is the latest in a trend of totally-not-Elon-Musks in TV and movies. From Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) to The Morning Show (2019—) to Succession (2018-2023), there’s a lot of this kind of guy to go around. Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie sets itself apart by combining Musk, Richard Branson, and Jeff Bezos into one “richest man in the world.” The “emperor-has-no-clothes” buffoonery of Musk is paired with the “ruthless guy who’s actually accomplished something” of the other two. If another textual comparison can be drawn, while Adrian Monk had his fair share of enemies in the TV show, such as Dale the Whale (Adam Arkin, Ray Porter, and Tim Curry), the Six-Fingered Man (Courtney Gains), and The Judge (Craig T. Nelson), the Reichenbach fall in the Sherlock Holmes story The Final Problem springs to mind. While Monk may have bested his Moriarty at the end of the TV show, this is his bitter battle with an insurmountable foe.
“Live forever? You really are a monster.”
What made Tony Shalhoub’s (Men in Black, Gattaca) Adrian Monk a character audiences fell in love with was the way his origin so neatly intertwined with the idea of the weekly procedural. He’s The Fugitive’s (1963-1967) Richard Kimble if he never stopped running and if the chase was always in his head. His recursive thoughts and obsession with his wife’s murder were perfect for the keep-it-going-as-long-as-possible nature of procedurals. His mental illness was the genre itself. Now, Monk is a man of rules, challenged by a man to whom the rules don’t apply, and that makes Monk’s internal conflict into a great meal for Shalhoub to sink his teeth into. Outside of the series finale, this is probably the best performance as Monk that Shalhoub has given. It is internal and bitter and resigned, and the way he interacts with the main cast has changed with time. There’s very little work left to do between Shalhoub and Traylor Howard (Son of the Mask, Dirty Work) as his second ex-assistant, but his chemistry with Caitlin McGee (Bluff City Law, Plus One) as his wife’s daughter Molly, is off the charts. While the reasons for recasting Molly have not been made public, every moment the two are on screen together is a delight, and McGee impresses comedically and dramatically. Héctor Elizondo (The Princess Diaries, Pretty Woman), who played Monk’s second psychiatrist, also gives his best performance in the role here.
L-R: Hector Elizondo as Dr. Neven and Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk in MR. MONK’S LAST CASE: A MONK MOVIE. Photo Credit: PEACOCK. Photo courtesy of PEACOCK.
The film adapts the procedural format of the show and the cast into a feature-length shape cleverly, following the format and inverting it at the same time. Even what could have been shoe-horned cameos are narrative essentials. It’s refreshing in its brevity and focus.
The only places where Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie struggles are its visuals and in finding its audience. If you didn’t like Monk, this won’t change your mind, especially if you don’t have Peacock. The NBC Universal streaming service has remained surprisingly strong in Hollywood’s race to the bottom of the content pile, but one can’t help but feel like this film would’ve become a cable classic like the show that birthed it if it wasn’t siloed away on an app.
Caitlin McGee as Molly in MR. MONK’S LAST CASE: A MONK MOVIE. Photo Credit: PEACOCK. Photo courtesy of PEACOCK.
Visually, the film follows a pattern of bursts of dynamism, followed by long stretches of a classical TV-with-more-money approach, tainted by today’s exposure crisis. Sometimes it looks great, sometimes it looks like the SNL parody of a Showtime movie. Flatly lit in the daytime and hard to see during the nighttime, the film still manages to have images that would have made great posters for the film, such as one great shot of Monk sitting in his office.
“Don’t listen to her. Give up all the hope you want.”
If this screenplay had been given what it needed (a bigger budget, a different sensibility, a different directive, whatever it is that keeps its visual sensibility straddling between modern streaming sludge and Hallmark movie), then this could, in fact, have been one of the best films of 2023. Instead, it will most likely be remembered as one of the great TV show movies, because it is. The finale of Monk is a great series finale. It ended the mystery and our sympathetic misery. Mr. Monk solved the case and won a future, and the show challenged its audience and lead character at the same time. However, despite itself, it could not fully deliver closure, because you know this guy will never really be ok. There is no cure for his grief, it only wanes. You know the rest of his life will be hard. What this film does is show that, at least, the suffering will be worth it.
Available on Peacock December 8th, 2023.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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