A few weeks back, as part of my effort to catch up on Oklahoma-made cinema, I watched C.I.Ape – a modern-day CGI-fueled flick that, more than anything, made me wish I was watching the 1970s camp classic Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp.
Filmed in the greater Oklahoma City area and a powerplant near Weatherford, C.I.Ape is a kid's movie that focuses on a “secret” spy agency filled with a cast of zany characters, most of which are played by anonymous actors wanting an IMDB credit.
The film primarily focuses on the tinker-tanker soldier-spying mischief of a girl named Bondi (Sophia Alongi) and her somewhat-verbal CGI ape-companion C.I.Ape.
As a team, they infiltrate the very epsilons of a cartoonish shadow government and take on its impish cronies who want to create a one-world dictatorship that will crush foes with the power of…well, that’s never really explained.
Although nothing really happens in this movie, and the plot is flimsier than a bad banana – as a matter of fact, I had to rewind the epilogue of the movie twice to find out what happened – it is packed with a bunch of grade school giggles and hijinks, like C.I.Ape doing the “dougie” after a win, the mission commander drinking sour milk, and Bondi’s family comically teetering on divorce.