From Publishers Weekly
Ambitious and intermittently funny, this debut satire sends up both detective and sci-fi genres with its story of simian mayhem. Dutch Flowers is a sad sack investigator charged with solving a murder at the Acteon Corporation, a Los Angeles biotech firm. Acteon breeds and studies genetically enhanced chimpanzees. One of its subjects, 99, has apparently been murdered by a fellow ape, and Dutch's job is to figure out which of the other chimps is the perp. Dutch himself is a former CIA assassin whose mission went spectacularly-and famously-wrong during the Gulf War. Now Dutch is being hounded by an Iraqi extortionist, which is why he decides to accept the assignment. Pryor's premise is a winner, spawning some hilarious deadpan observations ("I managed to establish the whereabouts of 35 chimps during the time period in which 99's murder had taken place") as well as inspired sequences, including a flashback in which Dutch and fellow CIA assassins interrupt a cohort of Saddam's prostitutes on their way to work, only to find that the women are more resourceful than the U.S.'s best black ops. But for every lean, hard-bitten comment, there's a counterpart bloated by too much exposition or studied hipness ("The bungled bid for the life of the dictator the American motorist loved to hate would make the fall of Saigon look like the wrap party for a B-movie"). One can only hope for more consistent work from the talented Pryor in the future.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This free-swinging romp through L.A.'s urban jungle finds Gulf War veteran Dutch Flowers tracking a killer chimpanzee from an exotic research lab even as he attempts to relocate his own humanity. Dutch was fed compassion-killing drugs to prepare him for Operation Slay Dracula, a last-ditch effort to assassinate Saddam Hussein before launching all-out war. The botched hit has left Dutch more hard-boiled than a 20-minute egg, and now he's being forced to pay for the sex-change operation of his would-be assassin, a perfumed Iraqi goon known only as Mr. Wonderful. So when the shadowy Acteon Corporation offers him $50,000 to finger a murderous simian, how can Dutch resist? "I needed to think like a chimp who thought like a man," he muses, but it soon becomes clear that the chimps are making a monkey out of him. Crazy though it may be, the story provides a bunch of bananas for thought about the similarities between us and our animal cousins. And fans of satirical noir will find plenty to ooh-ooh over here. Frank Sennett
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