KONG: SKULL ISLAND
Primate suspect
The beast is back in a ’Nam-set monster-slam!
RELEASED OUT NOW!
12a | 118 minutes Director Jordan Vogt-roberts Cast Tom Hiddleston, Brie larson, samuel l Jackson, John C reilly
Kong: Skull Island begins with a sly bait-and-switch. As the studio idents play there’s the howl of engines and a fierce stammer of machine guns. You can’t help but imagine the original Kong in his most iconic moment: straddling the Empire State Building and clawing at a swarm of biplanes. The stop-motion monarch of Manhattan, shortly to be deposed.
Often restaged but never bettered, the classic skyscraper showdown doesn’t just define 1933’s King Kong but the flickering spell cast by cinema itself (the 1976 remake relocated the climax to the World Trade Center; Peter Jackson recreated it with a digital sheen in 2005). Tellingly, it’s nowhere to be found in Hollywood’s latest revival of the first great movie monster.
The planes and the gunfire? A dogfight over the South Pacific, a breathless pre-titles tease that introduces Skull Island and the mighty paw that rules it. And this time the Eighth Wonder of the World stays firmly junglebound. Finally someone listened to that dame in the original film: “Ain’t we got enough gorillas in New York already?”
Building on the Monsterverse initiated by 2014’s Godzilla – but a film that’s infinitely more colourful and vibrant, truer to the delirious pop energy of a Toho B-movie – Kong: Skull Island finds creature-hunting agency Monarch on a mission to “the land where God did not finish creation”. It’s 1973, the last days of the Vietnam War, a choice of era that allows helmer Jordan Vogt-Roberts to channel the grunts, choppers and napalm of Apocalypse Now with added giant monkey.
Commanding 3rd Assault Helicopter Company is Samuel L Jackson, a disillusioned military man grateful for one last job. Along for the mission are civilians Brie Larson as an “anti-war photographer” and Tom Hiddleston, a flinty former SAS man introduced in a brutal pool hall fight that plays like a direct rebuttal to the notion that canoodling with Taylor Swift automatically disqualifies you from a licence to kill.
Vogt-Roberts made his name in comedy but shows a gift for the action setpiece and the killer visual. Kong’s reveal is memorable: a towering silhouette framed by a blood-red Coppola sun, the thump of approaching rotor blades like massed heartbeats. “Kill the son of a bitch!” cries Jackson, who gets to be Captain Ahab here, obsessed with bringing down his simian nemesis. Cue a disorientating chaos of tumbling helicopters, splintering glass and ape-snack extras hurtling through the air. It’s genuinely thrilling – and, with cutaway shots of a Richard Nixon bobblehead, funny, too.
There’s something authentically regal about this movie’s version of Kong, a young prince compared to Peter Jackson’s grizzled silverback. He’s an impressive digital creation, a sensitive-eyed soul for all that he tears giant squid to bits for breakfast. Having blown its titular star so early the film keeps our interest by unpacking the rest of its monstrous eco-system: a bird with a beak like a swordfish; a weed-draped water buffalo; a gnarled, skinny spider-beast.
This is, essentially, the middle act of the Kong story
Nastiest of all are the vicious Skullcrawlers, colossal lizards with snaking tongues and elongated forearms, the “devils” that are Kong’s natural enemy.
The plot? Get to Skull Island. Get off Skull Island. That’s it. Oh, there’s some business with a charismatic John C Reilly as an addled castaway but this is, essentially, the middle act of the classic Kong story, hacked out with a machete. It may have been beauty that killed the beast in the original but now the demands of a newborn franchise slap a preservation order on the big ape (the most meta post-credits tease you’ll ever see points us in no uncertain terms toward Godzilla Vs Kong in 2020).
So there’s no doomed crossspecies romance here (the movie doesn’t even have time for a romance between Larson and Hiddleston, let alone Larson and Kong). And without that essential tragedy in the shadow of the Empire State this is barely the Kong story. But it’s remorselessly entertaining, full of gosh and wow and a contagious delight in its own daftness. Be honest: some days all you want from the greatest artform of the past century is Tom Hiddleston in a gas mask, slicing pterodactyls in two. Nick Setchfield
Kong was mo-capped by Terry Notary, alias Rocket in the new run of Planet Of The Apes movies