If you don't know what that means, I'll use it in a sentence: "Gerard Butler is a poor man's Harrison Ford." If you don't have the money for Harrison Ford but you want a similar element in your movie, you hire Butler, who will work for pennies on Ford's dollar. (I hope I remember to come up with a better example before posting, because that comparison is very unfair to Ford and they aren't even in the same generation.)
The point is, the star of the new movie The Monkey, in a dual role, is a poor man's James Franco. Or was, anyway. Now that same poor man could probably better afford Franco than Theo James.
See, Janes Franco was cancelled, and rightly so. But another James, Theo, was waiting in the wings, ready to pounce.
But it's not primarily that Theo James is bringing to movies what Janes Franco brought to movies -- or might still bring, if the poor man is desperate enough, or poor enough. I'm not sure that he does, as their personas are not very similar.
It's that Theo looks almost exactly like Franco.
Here's Theo in The Monkey:
And here's Franco in Spider-Man:
Come on they're the same guy.
(Not so) crazy theory: Franco realized he could no longer get hired as "James Franco" so he came up with the alias "Theo James," so similar in structure but just with the order of the names switched. Why Theo? Well Theo was Vincent Van Gogh's more level-headed brother, and maybe JF needed a more level-headed alter ego to put his skeevy tendencies back in line. (Don't forget, Vincent Van Gogh was known for cutting his ear off for a woman. Different kind of skeevy.)
One problem with this theory: Theo is six years younger than Franco (if you believe Wikipedia), and Theo was making movies long before Franco got cancelled. In fact, his first credit is in 2010, the same year Franco was nominated for best actor for 127 Hours. (You might know him from the Divergent series, but I don't because I haven't seen any of those. I did enjoy his small bit in Dual, a top ten movie for me a couple years go.)
If the whole premise of this post seems founded on a certain dismissiveness of Theo James or The Monkey -- and you might expect me to be winding up for a thing like that, considering that I named the previous film by director Osgood Perkins, Longlegs, my worst movie of 2024 -- then it might surprise you to learn how tickled I was by this movie. It's great horror comedy, but maybe what makes it even greater is that it is balancing a couple tones at once, unafraid to consider some of the thornier issues of things like family relationships, particularly those between brothers.
And in this movie, Theo James plays both brothers -- the good one, and the bad one, though probably they're both neither monolithically good nor bad in our world of relativity. This movie has the kind of complexity to explore that notion, and the performance by James, while not outstanding in any particular dimension, is capable enough for Perkins' ideas to be in good hands.
And while we're on the topic of Perkins, thank goodness it looks like Longlegs was a misguided one-off. If you want to read my Monkey review, it's here. And Perkins returns to the form that made me love him so much in The Blackcoat's Daughter, though this is quite a different type of movie -- and not as good, though very few movies are. (Perkins has a great small role in this movie, too -- and what happens to his character is legendary.)
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