W. C. Fields hated to appear in the same scene with a baby, ananimal or a plunging neckline. He was afraid of being upstaged.Virgil, the gifted chimpanzee in "Project X," does not quite upstageMatthew Broderick, but it's one of the strengths of this movie thathe deserves co-star billing.
We meet Virgil, an African primate, as he's being shipped to America for a career at the University of Wisconsin's psychologydepartment. As played by a charismatic chimp named Willie, he turnsout to be a surprisingly clever little fellow, who picks up signlanguage from his trainer (Helen Hunt). Then his research projectloses its funding, and Virgil is shipped off under mysteriouscircumstances to an Air Force base in Florida, where he will train ona flight simulator.
That's where Broderick comes in. He's a troublemaking would-bepilot who is assigned to the chimp project as punishment. Oncethere, he turns out to be naturally gifted at identifying with theanimals, and after he discovers that Virgil knows sign language, theydevelop a trusting relationship. Then Broderick discovers the secretpurpose of the chimp research: First, the chimps are trained tooperate flight simulators, and then they're exposed to lethal dosesof radiation to find out how that might affect the performance ofhuman pilots during a nuclear war.
There is a large logical flaw in this experiment, and, to give"Project X" fair credit, Broderick himself points it out: Thedifference between chimps and human pilots is that the humans wouldknow they had been exposed to lethal radiation and that knowledgewould affect their performance, but the chimps' behavior wouldn't beaffected.
After the threat to Virgil's life is established, the movieturns into a thriller. Can Virgil be saved? Will Broderick destroyhis career? What would happen if the chimps discovered that theexperiment was designed to kill them? The last third of this moviecontains so many surprises that it would be unfair for me to evenhint at them.
"Project X" is not a great movie because its screenplay doesn'treally try for greatness. It's content to be a well-made,intelligent entertainment aimed primarily, I imagine, at brightteenagers. It works on that level. More complicated issues mighthave confused it. And if the movie had been forced to stay withinthe bounds of what a chimpanzee, even a smart one, can really do, wewould have lost the story's climax, which is a lot of fun butcompletely implausible in the real world.
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