The Island of Dr. Moreau

Under the steady direction of John Frankenheimer, the movie's most memorable scenes involve the beasts' half-human limitations, their blind allegiance to "father" Moreau, and their discovery of the painful implants he uses to control them. They often make up for what was the chief shortcoming in Wells' original: its thin plot. [23 Aug 1996]

This "Moreau" is also a pretty creepy affair - at least through its first two acts. Director John Frankenheimer, who is responsible for some of the most chilling thrillers in American film history ("The Manchurian Candidate," "Seconds") certainly knows a thing or two about building a menacing, suspenseful situation. [23 Aug 1996]

It flows, but it never gets tense, and the climax just sort of passes unnoticed. The movie reaches too hard to push messages about human nature that are really right on the surface. Complicating things is the casting of Brando and Kilmer, who as usual, are not in the same movie as the rest of the cast. [23 Aug 1996, p.3E]

Brando's performance is enormous fun, but it's not just a joke. He's hilarious and gently mesmerizing at once, and director John Frankenheimer savvily adjusts the tone of his movie to fit Brando's daft brilliance...Let's face it -- this is one nutty movie. It's not exactly "good," but I sure had a good time. Read full review

He’s become such an obvious parody of himself that Frankenheimer has permitted Kilmer to do a wicked mid-movie impersonation of Brando’s character; it’s funny, but it also gives The Island of Dr. Moreau an extra layer of camp it certainly didn’t need. Read full review

Frankenheimer resorts to gunfire and explosions to bring the film to its predictable end. It's when things get mundane that you find yourself wishing that Brando would reappear on the screen to make things interesting again. Read full review

Insultingly, Frankenheimer concludes the movie with a short sermon about the fine line that separates man from beast. If the director actually wanted to get this point across, he should have worked it into the film rather than tacking it on as an afterthought. It is, after all, an integral aspect of the source material. That it has been so thoroughly excised from the main plot isn't The Island of Dr. Moreau's only problem, but it's symptomatic of the flawed mindset that went into planning this occasionally incoherent and ultimately disappointing motion picture. Read full review

The latter stages of "Moreau" prove chaotic and confusing, negating what showed promise as a "Planet of the Apes" thriller...Any appearance by Marlon Brando is an event, if only to witness his latest transformation. He seems to have entered his Sydney Greenstreet period. Looking huge and sinister, he affects an upper-class English accent with lines such as, "I'm simply going to perish from the heat." He even sports a monocle in one scene...At times, Brando conveys a demented menace, but mostly his performance seems a mockery, of the film and himself...And Kilmer makes the most of his ambiguous role. [22 Aug 1996]

John Frankenheimer weaves a tidy sense of dread until he reveals what should scare us in The Island of Dr. Moreau. Then the movie degenerates into the equivalent of a roadshow tour of Cats gone horribly wrong. [23 Aug 1996, p.8]

Unfortunately, there isn't enough of Brando and Kilmer: Too much screen time is eaten up by the monsters, plotting their perfunctory uprising against their creator. Worse, the confusing climax never comes close to fulfilling the promise of the opening credits sequence (the best of any movie this the summer). But The Island of Dr. Moreau has sublimely weird moments in it that are hard to shake, and for starved horror fans, nowadays you take what you can get. [23 Aug 1996, p.5G]

What we deserved was "The Island of Jeanne Moreau." That I'd pay to see. Read full review

The movie keeps switching focus without ever getting its bearings, and when Brando exits earlier than expected, there's little but mayhem to fall back on. Moreau and mayhem are synonymous, to be sure, but we already know this going in. [23 Aug 1996]

I was never bored, even if the film ultimately amounts to little more than a very expensive freak show. Just before slurring one of the all-time great terrible last lines ("I want to go to dog heaven"), Kilmer utters, with sublime understatement, a line that doubles as the film's epitaph: "Well, that didn't work out." Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco. Read full review

As the barbaric Montgomery, who helps bring out the beast in the beast-men, Val Kilmer raids the closet of sinister mannerisms and tries them all on for size. Poor David Thewlis is in another movie entirely. Read full review

Sympathizing with Moreau would be difficult in any case. But with Brando in the role, there is the added obstacle of needing to suppress laughter every time he opens his pursed mouth. Read full review

It's ironic that a movie taking aim at the dangers of science run amok would invest so strongly in the science of its slick filmmaking and special makeup effects and so little toward the development of a cohesive screenplay, but such is the case with The Island of Dr. Moreau.

John Frankenheimer is credited as director, but given the scrambled, multiple agendas at play here, he seems to function more like a bemused traffic cop. Read full review

Mr. Brando's performance will be deemed interestingly audacious only by those who found "Apocalypse Now" too sane. Read full review

The Island of Dr. Moreau ought to have been a great film in these times of gene splicing and DNA research and all the moral, ethical and practical questions those developments raise. But director John Frankenheimer and screenwriters Richard Stanley and Ron Hutchinson's attempt to update Wells yields only a maddening mess of empty gestures. Read full review

As a sci-fi action movie, the latest Moreau is sub-schlock. As a thinly veiled post-colonial allegory, it's dangerously close to racism. Either way, it's one of the most ridiculous movies in a ridiculous summer. Read full review

Frankenheimer and company, perhaps realizing they were making a bad movie, have taken steps to make "Dr. Moreau" gloriously bad, with comical dialogue that can only have been meant to elicit laughter. [23 Aug 1996, p.44]

This movie is not just bad, it is breathtakingly, spectacularly, awesomely bad. You might want to see it out of curiosity. [23 Aug 1996, p.40]

The disastrous new version of H.G. Wells' "The Island of Dr. Moreau" at least affords Marlon Brando a grand entrance and a great comic portrayal. [23 Aug 1996, p.F12]