Joseph Kahn’s Ick is a garish, confused mess of a horror-comedy straining for cult-audience validation (see: the three-day Fathom Events rollout). It plays like the work of an auteur who’s lost his fastball. That’s a dispiriting development, given that Kahn once boasted a near-perfect résumé: a run of iconic pop videos from the late ’90s through the late 2010s; a meta-satirical tour de force in Detention; a sober yet wildly entertaining deconstruction of battle-rap bravado in Bodied; and the kinetic verve of his actual cult-favorite Torque. Each of these showcased razor-sharp execution, impeccable instincts, and an ability to fuse idiosyncratic vision with accessible, crowd-pleasing pop cinema. No matter how off-kilter the premise, Kahn seemed to tap into the cultural zeitgeist.
With Ick, he abandons all of that in favor of a shallow, curmudgeonly pastiche. He seems uninterested in updating — let alone interrogating — the film’s referents, instead recycling them wholesale: the entire final act lifts directly from Robert Rodriguez’s ’90s teen B-movie The Faculty, and the soundtrack leans on the most obvious aughts-era pop-punk needle drops. The result is an arrested, nostalgic homage that feels inert.
The film’s hapless hero is Hank (Brandon Routh), a former high school quarterback/prom king-turned-science teacher at his old alma mater after a debilitating injury. Routh’s considerable comedic talents are squandered in a thankless role that toggles between dopey detachment and empty sentimentality. Hank becomes a Kahn surrogate — a straight-man foil used to sneer at a gallery of far-left and far-right cartoon villains, all of whom blandly regurgitate just slightly outdated culture war talking points, especially once the vaguely Covid-era, vaguely Trump allegorical monster movie plot kicks in.
The action-horror beats are no better, sabotaged by the incoherence of the monster itself: a creeping alien fungus that Body Snatches its victims and can apparently do anything — as long as the sun’s not out. Yet it often just sits on the sidelines or retreats for the sake of plot convenience. Whatever metaphor is intended — Trumpism? gun violence? climate change? — is far too murky to even register.
But nowhere is Ick more galling than in its smug, equivocating politics. Kahn’s both-sides-are-bad stance reeks of privileged detachment, the kind that reduces actual ideological stakes to Internet cosplay. Where his boundary-pushing brashness once marked him as a pop-culture insurgent, Ick is defined by aimlessness. Ironically — or perhaps fittingly — Kahn’s film repels not through any lurid provocation, but by embodying the same indifferent shrug as its characters.
DIRECTOR: Joseph Kahn; CAST: Mena Suvari, Brandon Routh, Malina Pauli Weissman, Mariann Gavelo; DISTRIBUTOR: Fathom Entertainment; IN THEATERS: July 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
Comments are closed.