Dunston Checks In (1996)
★★ — Dunston Checks In (1996)
There's a specific kind of film that existed almost exclusively in the mid-to-late 90s: glossy, loud, held together by cartoon logic and the vague hope that kids wouldn't notice the plot falling apart around them. Dunston Checks In is a textbook example. I watched it, I chuckled once or twice, and by the time the credits rolled I was already halfway to forgetting it existed.
The setup is exactly as daft as it sounds. A jewel thief, played by Faye Dunaway, is using a trained orangutan as her unwitting accomplice while hiding stolen goods inside a luxury hotel. The ape, Dunston, befriends a lonely boy, escapes his handler's clutches, and proceeds to cause absolute mayhem through the penthouse suites. Coincidences pile up. The hotel staff react with the wide-eyed, rubbery horror of people who've never encountered a physical comedy beat before. The stakes are, frankly, nonexistent. You always know exactly where this is going, and it gets there in the most predictable fashion imaginable.
What keeps it from being a total write-off is Sam, the orangutan who plays Dunston. I'll be honest with you: the ape is genuinely entertaining. There's something irresistible about watching him flush cigars down the toilet, swipe food from unsuspecting guests, or mimic human behaviour with that mischievous glint in his eye. Sam carries nearly every scene he's in, and the film is smart enough to know it, because it keeps pointing the camera at him whenever the script runs dry. Which is often.
Dunaway, meanwhile, clearly knows exactly what kind of film she's turned up to. She leans into the campy villainess role with tremendous relish, chewing the scenery with the energy of someone who decided, quite rightly, that subtlety would be wasted here. Fair play to her. Young Erik von Detten does a decent enough job as the put-upon kid at the centre of it all, though he's given precious little to work with beyond reacting to whatever the orangutan is doing. The rest of the cast, particularly the brigade of snobbish hotel staff, are stuck delivering tired, over-the-top reactions that had already been done better elsewhere. It's the kind of supporting cast that exists purely to be humiliated by an ape.
1996 was, as it happens, a genuinely interesting year for family films. I've got a lot of affection for Muppet Treasure Island (1996), which came out the same year and managed to be funny, warm and genuinely well-crafted, the sort of thing that still holds up when you revisit it as an adult. Dunston Checks In has no such staying power. It's the kind of film that aired endlessly on a Saturday morning, filled ninety minutes of your weekend, and had completely evaporated from memory by Sunday teatime. I don't say that as the harshest insult imaginable, but it's not exactly a compliment either.
There's a version of this film that could've been sharper, funnier, more inventive with its central premise. An orangutan loose in a grand hotel is genuinely a good starting point. The bones are there. But the script settles for the easiest gag every single time, the comedy never builds to anything, and the emotional beats between Dunston and the boy are too thin to land properly. It's all surface and no substance, glossy fluff that mistakes noise and movement for wit.
Two stars. Not entirely joyless, thanks almost entirely to one very talented primate. But as actual cinema, it barely holds together. A relic of a bygone era in kids' comedy, and probably best left there.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 1996 | Watched: 2025-08-12
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