Admirable film.

The first must-see film of the year.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Okay, a movie for James Franco, also directed and written by Franco. It's about a working man who dreams to be a writer, so he rents an apartment to write his novel in peace, only to find that the apartment is occupied by a big foul-mouthed gorilla.The presentation itself is good, interesting idea. However, through an hour and a half, all I gained from watching it is time wasting. It seemed that the film was done by amateurs; bad shooting, bad story, dialog is done poorly, and most of all bad acting, in fact Mr. Franco adds to the agony in this film by being a bad actor himself.What chance did that film had to make it? By what it has now, none. Its only chance if it was done in different time (like in the forties and fifties, with remodeled storyline of course), or a cartoon film with family oriented dialog.For me, zero stars are more like it, but I gave it two because the only thing that helped me through is that I managed to turn on my childish imagination and imagine that the ape is real.

What I expected of this after seeing the trailer, I'm not sure. I guess I was hoping that James Franco would somehow have created a movie with a purpose. I thought, at worse, this movie would be so bad, it would be good. But this movie was so bad it 360'd back to bad. Why? Well, in most movies there's a suspension of disbelief, a relation to a character that makes you feel something, and a plot. This movie has maybe 1 of those 3. I really tried to get myself to believe that the character Harry was seriously living with an ape, but for many many reasons (one being that in 50% of the shots you could see straight through the ape mask) I was struck with the notion that James Franco just didn't know he was even in this movie. I'm pretty sure there were only 2 enjoyable moments in this movie. One was because I can't remember being able to use the phrase "apesh*t" and mean it in the most literal sense. The second was when the film inspired my friend to say "He literally **bleeped** Dostoevsky in the face". In the end, there was no "a-ha" moment that made me realize all the inaneness was worth it. But because this movie inspired me to bake both banana cookies and banana bread, I will give it three stars.

I had to rent this movie just because it sounded so off-the-wall that I would probably enjoy it. I did. I've been a fan of James Franco since "Freaks and Geeks" and I was excited to see that he had written and directed the film. He's a great actor and he was great here as the frustrated writer, Harry Walker. Mr. Walker rents an apartment so he can be away from his family to concentrate on his writing. He moves in only to find a talking, wise-cracking, clothes-wearing ape already lives there. It's just such a goofy concept and I love that the ape costume doesn't even come CLOSE to looking realistic. Yet, it's really supposed to be an ape, not a man in an ape suit. It's part of the movie's charm. Brain Lally is great as the ape. The dialogue back and forth between Lally and Franco is hilarious. It's just a great little independent film.

As a film school graduate, I've seen my share of terrible films. Being a fan of James Franco's, I felt that The Ape would at least be interesting. Instead, I was tricked into watching a pretentious James Franco ego-trip. The only good part of the film was its music, which wasn't featured enough. Otherwise, this film was slowly paced, overly perverse, wordy, misdirected, miscast and wildly unclever. I hate bashing somebody's hard work, but if I were to sugar-coat my feelings, somebody might make the same mistake that I made by watching The Ape.The next time James Franco has this much time on his hands, I suggest he take up treasure hunting, or anything else that doesn't involve writing or directing.