I think it's safe to say that Joseph Kahn is quite a divisive director. He certainly has a unique style, one that has been suited better to some films (Bodied) than others (Detention). And he also gave us Torque, which is a whole separate issue. Here he is now with Ick, co-written by Kahn, Dan Koontz, and Samuel Laskey, a sci-fi horror comedy that makes use of 2000s nostalgia and modern-day CGI.
Brandon Routh plays Hank, a man who hasn't had his life turn out the way he hoped it would. An American Football star for a while, injury on the field put a stop to his big dreams. He ends up as a science teacher, stuck in the small town that he hoped to eventually see dwindling in the rear-view mirror. There are regrets, particularly over how things went wrong with his high school sweetheart (Staci, played by Mena Suvari). There's also the Ick, a strange plant-like thing that landed in town years ago, but is now entering a new growth stage, allowing it to infect and use humans in zombiefied and mutated form.
There's fun to be had here, and some of the main sequences are filled with great inventiveness and spectacle, but the main thing working against Ick is the lack of any real horror or tension underpinning things. The leads are shown to be pretty impervious quite early on, especially while running through scenes that show the Ick grabbing and destroying others around them with speed and ease. This isn't a film to keep you on edge, but nor is it fun enough to rely on the gags being good enough for most viewers.
Routh is great in the lead role, and I was very happy to see him do something that made such good use of him, and his young co-stars (Malina Weissman, Taia Sophia, Zeke Jones, and Harrison Cone) all do well to match him. Weissman is a strong co-lead, and Cone deserves extra praise for being such an enjoyable and hateable "faux sensitive" dudebro. Suvari and Peter Wong do well in their supporting roles, the former helping to boost the nostalgia factor, and the other main star is the Ick itself, well-realised by a whole team of workers.
Sadly, the film doesn't ever feel truly deserving of the cast. It's paradoxical that Khan and co. are so interested in hurtling along from start to finish that what could have been energetic and exciting ends up feeling like a bit of a slog instead. I enjoyed individual moments, especially when certain people would meet a sticky end, but once you've seen one Ick attack you've pretty much seen them all. Perhaps if the premise had made more use of the zombiefication, as it does when our hero is hounded by two local cops, then it could have been a better film, but it doesn't.
Still, it's slick stuff, helped along by a soundtrack full of firm favourites from the turn of the century. I will recommend it to those that want something disposable and, well, a bit icky in between some more worthwhile horror movie viewings, but it's a shame that the end result isn't better. It really should have been.
5/10
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