APE OF WRATH
‘King Kong’ stars a splendid beast in a woefully dull story
‘KONG: Skull Island” is a strange sort of monster movie, one set in the shadow of the Vietnam War, where the monsters are misunderstood Pacific natives defending their turf and the aggressors are blundering Westerners probably on some kind of imperialist mission. That’s right: It’s a farleft allegory that could have been called “Viet Kong.”
The monster battles have enough wow to keep the movie rolling along, but the connective tissue is so thin that it scarcely matters who lives and who gets stomped, eaten, blown up, ripped to shreds or impaled.
After a prologue set on an uncharted Pacific island in 1944 that gives away far too much, a scientist (John Goodman) persuades a senator to let him gather a team to explore a mysterious, skull-shaped island in the waning days of the Vietnam War, in 1973.
His military team of explorers includes a frustrated colonel (Samuel L. Jackson) and a soldier of fortune (Tom Hiddleston) as well as a photojournalist, (Brie Larson) who prides herself on having helped turn opinion against the long-running war.
Skull Island, which the Goodman character has reason to suspect is the most appalling den of monsters this side of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, turns out to be exactly that: As the helicopters are flying in, the crew encounters an ape the size of a skyscraper who swats them into scrap metal. So do the pilots respond by, say, flying away? Nah. They remain for the purpose of receiving punishment.
Which is a little how I felt as the movie, directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts (“The Kings of Summer”), tumbles from one woeful line of dialogue to the next. When the photographer meets someone who notes that she is, unexpectedly, a woman, she says, “Last time I checked.” Har har. There’s also lots of trite saddle-up dialogue such as “Let’s do this!” and even more clichéd musical cues: “Bad Moon Rising,” “White Rabbit.”
Worse, Vogt-Roberts keeps diluting the scares with clunky gags. When one hapless fellow falls into Kong’s mouth, Vogt-Robert cuts to another guy biting into a sandwich. The tension of a crash scene is undermined by a visual joke about a Richard Nixon bobblehead doll.
Meeting a half-crazed World War II pilot (John C. Reilly) who has been living on the island for 28 years, the gang learns that the land is home to prehistoric creatures who have been using the hollow space beneath the ground as a portal from the primordial. There’s a spider with nasty, spear-like legs, dinosaur birds and a huge lizard who has a thrilling battle with Kong in the film’s visually dazzling climax, one that nevertheless reminded me of professional wrestling.
Vogt-Roberts never develops the characters enough to make us care whether anyone lives or dies and never whips up even a flirtation between Hiddleston and Larson, much less convinces us that there is the kind of deep connection between beauty and beast that Peter Jackson delivered so beautifully in his far more engaging “King Kong” (2005).
This time, half the cast simply decides on a hunch that Kong is a nice guy — that we should excuse his savagery because we’re invasive Americans and that everyone should treat the big furball who just killed a dozen of their mates as a kind of XXL Chewbacca. Personally, between “Stay to fight” and “Stay to understand Kong’s feelings,” I’d choose “Run like hell.” But then you’d have a 30-minute movie.