One time Superman Brandon Routh has his best role in years as the everyman hero in Joseph Kahn’s horror-comedy, Ick.
PLOT: A high school science teacher (Brandon Routh) tries to save his students and town from a parasitic alien entity.
REVIEW: Joseph Kahn is one of the most underrated genre directors. His first movie, Torque, was a big flop but holds up relatively well twenty years later as a kind of quasi-spoof of early-2000s era action movies in the vein of XXX and The Fast and the Furious. His follow-up, the teen sci-fi flick, Detention, was a total blast, and the last movie he made, Bodied, was probably his best movie to date. Sadly, it kinda got lost when the short-lived YouTube Red picked it up (and, in fact, you can still see it on YouTube Premium). Now he’s back with Ick, which is very much in the mould of Detention and was one of the most energetic and fun movies I saw out of this year’s TIFF Midnight Madness.
For those who may not know, Kahn is one of the biggest music video directors of all time, with his heyday arguably being the 2000s (although he’s still quite prolific). Ick is a love letter to that era, with the lead, Brandon Routh’s Hank Wallace, having been a high school glory boy back in the 2000s, who lost his shot at the big time after a drunken accident that crippled one of his legs. After digging himself out of a bottle, he became a high school science teacher and is viewed by his students as well-meaning but lame.
Routh’s casting is especially potent, as back in 2006, he was promised the world when he signed on to star in Superman Returns. Despite the movie making a decent amount of cash (it wasn’t the flop people remember it as), for some reason, he never got the push to stardom many predicted. He was also the butt of a notoriously cruel joke in the movie Ted. He’s worked consistently since then, but Ick is his best role, probably since he played the Man of Steel.
His Hank Wallace is similar to his stammering Clark Kent persona in some ways, with him shy around girls (even if they all lust after him) and struggling to stay sober, which isn’t easy as he inherited a bar from his bartender father (the great Jeff Fahey). Once the Ick starts to spread, he becomes an unlikely hero, motivated by the fact that one of his students, Grace (Malina Weissman), might be his daughter, as her mother (another 2000-era icon, Mena Suvari) is his long-ago ex.
Ick is very much in the mould of Night of the Creeps or The Blob (with characters even watching the 1958 version on TV at one point). The interesting twist is that the Ick has actually been present for years, slowly growing over time, with everyone just too ignorant to care (the Ick is also shown to be have spread over the entire country).
Kahn has a blast satirizing the current era, slamming overly sensitive cancel culture, with the kids this centers around so inundated by it that Routh’s character can barely get a word out without one of them slamming him as “ableist” or inappropriate. The movie’s major villain is a teen who constantly goes around accusing everyone of cultural appropriation or being part of the patriarchy, despite him being a white male teen (although he claims to be “1/8th Cherokee with receipts”). Kahn also gets a lot of laughs out of the fact that the final girl, Grace, has grown up believing that she’s half Korean but is probably just fully Caucasian if Hank is her dad.
In that way, Ick works even better as a comedy than a horror film, although the body count is staggering as it goes on. Kahn wants this to go out with a PG-13, so the dialogue is clever but clean, with gore replaced by goo. It feels like the kind of horror movie I would have watched at a sleepover. It’s also a nostalgic blast for those of us who grew up in the 2000s, with Kahn calling upon his deep bunch of musician pals to allow him to assemble a soundtrack of non-stop hits, including everyone from Blink 182 to Creed.
I really hope Ick gets more of a release than Bodied did, as Kahn may well be the best genre director you’ve never heard of, and it’s scandalous that his movies don’t get the attention they deserve. This one is a lot of damn fun.
