DThose were the days when the name Monk had meaning. “But over ten years have now passed and the world has changed for a long time,” says Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub), the title character of the popular television series, at the start of the long-awaited film sequel “Mr. Monk's Last Case”. From 2002 to 2009, Monk used his neurotic pedantry to solve tricky criminal cases.
Now he has to do it again – not least because his career as a book author, with which he wanted to pass the time after retiring from the police service, has just collapsed. But above all because the murder victim is a family member and old wounds open up for the man who tried to solve the murder of his wife Trudy over the course of the series.
His self-doubt is greater than ever
The film, whose script was written by series creator Andy Breckman, finds nice starting points, including a look back at the very first episode and the appearance of some ghosts from Monk's past. Almost the entire former cast is gathered here for a wedding in San Francisco: the underexposed and self-confident Lieutenant Randy Disher (Jason Gray-Stanford), his former boss Captain Leland Stottlemeyer (Ted Levine), Monk's assistant and buffer for the world, Natalie Teeger (Traylor Howard), and his psychiatrist Neven Bell (Hector Elizondo), Monk's late wife Trudy (Melora Hardin), who appears to him every now and then, and her adult daughter from a previous relationship, Molly (Caitlin McGee), who only appears on the scene series finale and Monk gave a wonderful, real slice of Trudy.
And of course Shalhoub's Adrian Monk himself, the “defective detective” with the phobias and obsessive compulsive disorders that give rise to his sense of fleeting details and the smallest inconsistencies. “What’s it like going back to work?” his psychiatrist asks him. “It’s like riding a bike,” says Monk, and to his therapist’s delighted nod: “Scary.”
The series was a comedy, but a lot of it had a dark background. Monk's tics stem from his deep shock at the death of his wife Trudy. In the finale of the series he finally solves this, his most difficult case. This broke the knot and it was difficult to imagine a continuation. But Andy Breckman – he already had a TV movie in 2012 called “Mr. Monk for Mayor, which did not come to fruition – cleverly starts at exactly this point: Trudy and Monk's longing for her are still the focus, and since he lost everything when he retired from police work and the pandemic has taken a greater toll on him than that Most others, Monk's self-doubt is greater than ever.
Difficulties with the disorder of the world
At first he only half-heartedly gets involved in the investigation into an accidental death, which Molly believes to be a murder. As always, Randy Disher already has a bold thesis at hand. The trail leads to the estate of billionaire Rick Eden (James Purefoy), an online mail order company, newspaper owner and rocket builder (and as someone who brutally booted out an early partner, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk all in one). Another old friend appears there: Stottlemeyer is now Eden's head of security. He carries a big salary home and a sinfully expensive watch, a gift from his boss, on his wrist and doesn't let his employer get anything wrong. But not murder?
Breckman equips the finale with numerous standard pieces from the series: Monk's difficulty with chairs and the general disorder of the world, inspired guest roles (Shalhoub's wife Brooke Adams again plays a supporting character), a joke grounded in melancholy, and some scenes whose logic follows the plot is subordinate. At its core, it's not about finding the perpetrator, but rather about Monk's relationship with the other characters and, above all, with himself, which was already the main theme in the series and is brought to a head here. The film, which represents the end and the beginning at the same time, closes the Monk case on a very poetic note.
Mr. Monk's last case runs on Friday on Magenta TV.
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