Entertainment

Clunky monkey

They probably should have called it “Beneath the Dignity of the Planet of the Apes,” but “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is tolerable if you’ll just keep in mind that the original feature was an overachieving B-movie.

In this origins story, James Franco’s career evolves in reverse (last year he was in “127 Hours;” call this one “27 IQ”) as he plays a San Francisco researcher searching for a cure for Alzheimer’s, which afflicts his dad (John Lithgow).

Not only does his “112 virus” cure the degenerative disease, but it also supercharges normal brains. After a misunderstanding about the virus’ effects at the lab while testing it on chimps, though, the boss, Jacobs (David Oyelowo), demands that Will (Franco) stop using the stuff.

Instead, Will takes home a super-intelligent baby chimp, names him Caesar and uses his superior mental gifts exactly the way I would: to hit on Freida Pinto. (She’s the “Slumdog Millionaire” girl, and as a vet who treats Caesar she gets to spend the movie doing nothing except standing next to Franco looking like Freida Pinto, which ought to be enough but somehow isn’t. Three years from Best Picture to Best Human Scenery? Depressing.)

Caesar, who is 3 when the couple meets, grows to be as big as a man by age 8. During this five-year-period, it apparently never occurs to the girl to ask, “Will, how is it that we came to be living with a chimp who could give Stephen Hawking some tutoring?” Nor do the neighbors file complaint, even though one of them has already had a scary encounter with the beast. Nor does Will tell his boss that the 112 virus has fully cured his dad’s Alzheimer’s and that consequently the firm has the rights to the world’s most valuable drug.

Meanwhile, the boss — who is meant to be a villain but is as boring as a week at the DMV — suddenly changes from being overly cautious about drug testing to absurdly careless.

When Caesar nearly kills a neighbor, though, he’s off to the local animal shelter, where the chief (Brian Cox) tells Will that the chimp will be kept in a bucolic wonderland. Instead, Caesar is shoved in a fetid cage and teased by a nasty guard (Tom Felton, a k a Draco Malfoy) who doesn’t know who he’s dealing with and has “first victim” written all over him. Yet it takes the movie a good 45 minutes to catch up to the audience.

During that time we are treated to endless scenes of Caesar in his cage, Caesar getting into scraps with other apes and Caesar distributing chocolate chip cookies to other beasts. Come on, guys, pick up the pace: I paid for hairy mayhem, not Chips Ahoy.

Why the guard — a twerp who looks like your average Kinko’s employee, not a sadist whose brutality is responsible for changing the fate of the Earth — gets so much screen time is a mystery. Especially when the movie’s got the ably villainous Brian Cox, who once played Hannibal Lecter, sitting around nearby. And neither Felton nor anybody else should ever say “Get your paw off me, you damn dirty ape” with a straight face. At least no actor whose name doesn’t rhyme with Harlton Cheston.

Caesar and the other apes in captivity are surly, maladjusted, vaguely Marxist and forever trying to organize themselves — they’re a lot like graduate students — but when they finally pull together you can almost forgive the dullness of everything that’s come before.

At last, the primates run amok in San Francisco and roar over the Golden Gate Bridge while behind them guns are blazing, helicopters are whirling and Will is wandering into the spray of bullets asking if anybody’s seen his lost buddy. (Pinto’s line during the pandemonium: “Be careful.”)

The monkeys don’t seem to want anything except to live in the redwood forest and maybe an apology for the 1976 version of “King Kong.” But as they settle down and establish themselves as the alpha species, I couldn’t quite summon much terror. Could they really be any worse than the real-life government of the state of California?

kyle.smith@nypost.com