Crime
The Residence
As much as one might enjoy solving a good mystery, there’s a fair bit of content slop to muck through in Netflix’s The Residence.
Bryce Fowler was just your average, all-around awesome guy.
Or so he claimed.
Secretly, the dude was an assassin. As soon as he had earned money for a kill, he’d be out drinking, gambling and partying it away.
But not anymore. Because he’s dead. Sort of. Let me explain.
His last job was to murder an up-and-coming Japanese politician. Bryce succeeded, but then the guy who hired him double-crossed him.
Bryce managed to escape the first little crew of would-be killers, blowing them up with a hidden bomb. (Guess it’s always best to be prepared for the worst.)
Bleeding heavily, out of resources (other than the guns he purchased to complete the job) and unable to seek aid (since you can’t really go to the police when you’re a mercenary), he wandered into the mountains. And he would have died if not for a kindly pack of snow monkeys.
Directed by the group’s alpha male, the monkeys manage to heal Bryce using a combination of herbs and hot springs.
But his presence among the beasts caused strife, since many of the younger monkeys don’t agree with the alpha’s choice to help Bryce.
When one monkey tries to tell his pack how dangerous Bryce is, they don’t believe him. He gets banished after going on a rampage and accidentally hurting a fellow monkey. And to add even more salt to the wound, shortly after entering exile, his prediction that someone would come looking for Bryce comes true.
He rushes back to help, but after the mercenaries kill Bryce, they murder the monkey pack in cold blood, too, laughing at their feeble attempts to defend themselves with snowballs.
Their violence awakens something in the banished monkey. Channeling his newfound anger, he picks up Bryce’s guns and decimates the human forces.
And remember how I said Bryce was dead? Well, now he’s a ghost latched on to the Japanese macaque, determined to help this “hit monkey” get revenge.
Despite some ups and downs in their relationship, Bryce and the monkey manage to take out many infamous killers and corrupted officials. That is until Bryce is taken to hell and the monkey is fleeing from murder charges.
But this doesn’t mean their adventures are over. Bryce strikes a deal with the devil and returns to reconnect with his daughter, help protect a cursed sword and give the monkey his mojo back.
While the show is about a man and his monkey, it’s no Curious George.
Let’s start with the violence. I don’t know when Hollywood sent around a memo stating that every anime-style or Japanese-themed TV show needed an excess of blood, gore and obscure murder sequences, but I really wish it would get rescinded. Characters are shot, blown up and beheaded. Innocent animals are massacred. And the driving plot point here is revenge.
That “revenge” is likely what turned Bryce into a ghost—because of the “unfinished business” trope. But as much as Bryce wants to get back at the guys who betrayed him, he also doesn’t want to be stuck as a specter forever. The only way to fix that is to somehow atone for the life of violence and cruelty that he lived. And once that’s done, might as well help the monkey keep making money as a mercenary macaque.
As the monkey starts to follow in Bryce’s path, murdering starts to take a psychological toll on him, leading him to abusively drink.
In Season Two, we learn that Bryce’s spectral form and mortality is in the hands of Mephisto, who is the epitome of evil.
And if all that doesn’t have you rolling your eyes and looking for a different show, then perhaps the show’s TV-MA level language will. We hear everything up to the f-word, including abuse of God’s and Christ’s names.
Ironically, Bryce tells Hit-Monkey to not touch a gun because “you pick up one of these in anger and you’ll never put it down.” And I would say that viewers have no need to pick up Hit-Monkey in anger or otherwise.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at [email protected], or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
After four months of very bloody mercenary work and a lot of drinking, the monkey finally lands a contract with Bryce’s old agent. And Bryce—back from hell—is with him every step of the way, with his spectral form now able to move objects.
Maybe it was his short stint in the fiery afterlife, but Bryce is definitely crasser at the start of Season Two, making allusions to sex and bestial masturbation.
The monkey shoots a restaurant full of people and Bryce calls it the “last supper.”
The casual and morally bereft mercenary work starts to take a toll on the monkey psychologically, who wants to refuse his destiny as “killer of killers.”
An old acquaintance finds a sword that will possess its wielder with the souls of all who have held the sword before.
The first scene of the second season is perhaps the most disturbing. Bryce is shown completely unclothed (we see the side of his animated behind) dangling over a pit of fire with metal hooks in his flesh.
There he meets Mephisto, who informs him it is too late to make things right: His fate for killing in anger was determined according to the Bible.
We hear nearly 15 uses of the s-word and four uses of the f-word along with uses of “a–hole,” “d–k,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “c–k” and “p-ss.” God’s and Christ’s names are abused, several times with “d–n.”
After getting double-crossed, assassin Bryce Fowler finds himself living amongst a pack of snow monkeys.
A murdered man returns as ghost hoping for revenge. A monkey calls a man a “devil” and insists the man is evil.
Many people are murdered—some shot, some blown up and some beheaded—and we see lots of bloodshed. A group of mercenaries massacres a pack of monkeys for throwing snowballs at them (and they laugh as they commit this cruelty). A monkey punches a few of his fellows in anger, causing one to bleed. (He is then banished from his pack.)
We hear uses of the s-word, “a–hole,” “b–tard,” “c—y,” “h—” and “p—k.” God’s and Christ’s names are abused.
A man gets drunk repeatedly. People gamble and party. Someone offers to purchase a pornographic film. We see a shirtless man. Monkeys chew up herbs before spitting them into a man’s mouth to help him heal.
Caleb Gottry is the Plugged In intern for Summer 2024. Caleb studies journalism with a minor in music at Texas Christian University, where he will be a junior in the fall. He loves playing with words, listening to and making music, and spending any spare time with friends or family.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
As much as one might enjoy solving a good mystery, there’s a fair bit of content slop to muck through in Netflix’s The Residence.
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