Look, I love Monk, and it was really nice to see all the old characters again, but this was a terrible epilogue to a story that had a pretty excellent ending years ago.
The series finale showed us an Adrian Monk who was a healed person, being happy, at long last, after years of torment.
This movie took this happy ending and flushed it down the toilet.
We're told that Covid made Monk regress completely, which was a real disservice to the character. I think a much more fun take would have been to visit Monk during Covid when the whole world had become like him, and to see him just enjoying life, and loving everyone's extra precautions.
But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that they turned Monk not just into an unhappy man again, but actually full-on suicidal. Tonally, this was an absurd shift for the Monk universe. Way too heavy on a good day, and just a horrific choice considering that when we left Monk he was having his happily-ish ever after.
The ghost of Trudy was also a terrible choice, but made so much worse by the writers going all-in on the ghosts at the end of the movie. It just didn't feel like Monk at all. It felt like some weird Lifetime movie or something.
Lastly, the central mystery of the story just felt too small for the final Monk send-off. The last case we saw was him solving his own wife's murder. This one was just... not weighty at all.
I think a better Monk movie would be a happy, Covid-era Monk, where he spent the movie entirely in his comfort zone, while it was the rest of the world that was newly and obsessively cleaning. A zen-like Mr. Monk against a panicking world would have given us the Monk we deserve, plenty of comedy, and movie worth making.
The series finale showed us an Adrian Monk who was a healed person, being happy, at long last, after years of torment.
This movie took this happy ending and flushed it down the toilet.
We're told that Covid made Monk regress completely, which was a real disservice to the character. I think a much more fun take would have been to visit Monk during Covid when the whole world had become like him, and to see him just enjoying life, and loving everyone's extra precautions.
But that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that they turned Monk not just into an unhappy man again, but actually full-on suicidal. Tonally, this was an absurd shift for the Monk universe. Way too heavy on a good day, and just a horrific choice considering that when we left Monk he was having his happily-ish ever after.
The ghost of Trudy was also a terrible choice, but made so much worse by the writers going all-in on the ghosts at the end of the movie. It just didn't feel like Monk at all. It felt like some weird Lifetime movie or something.
Lastly, the central mystery of the story just felt too small for the final Monk send-off. The last case we saw was him solving his own wife's murder. This one was just... not weighty at all.
I think a better Monk movie would be a happy, Covid-era Monk, where he spent the movie entirely in his comfort zone, while it was the rest of the world that was newly and obsessively cleaning. A zen-like Mr. Monk against a panicking world would have given us the Monk we deserve, plenty of comedy, and movie worth making.