12 MONKEYS (1995)

12 MONKEYS (R) For the first time since Brazil (1985), the director Terry Gilliam unleashes his crackpot imagination at full throttle. The year is 2035. Humanity, or what's left of it, has been driven underground by a plague that wiped out most of the earth's population. A convicted criminal, James Cole (Bruce Willis), is strapped into a time machine and sent back to the pre-plague days so that he can learn how the deadly germ came to spread. Gilliam plugs us so deeply into the moods he creates that we find ourselves making the same hallucinatory leaps that Cole does; the movie gets our heads spinning, too. Willis, eyes druggy and lost, is playing a guy who's had the soul beat out of him, and it's enthralling to see him recover it. As the jabbering psychotic Jeffrey Goines, Brad Pitt has a rabid, get-a-load-of-me deviousness that works for the film's central mystery: We can't tell where the fanatic leaves off and the put-on artist begins. B+

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