Oh dear, Tom, it’s all gone very KING KONG
Tom Hiddleston escapes with his dignity (just!) as the giant ape destroys everything in its path... including the reputation of Oscar winner Brie Larson
Kong: Skull Island C ert: 12A 1hr 58mins ★★★★★
At the London premiere of Kong: Skull Island, its star, Tom Hiddleston, described it as an ‘old-fashioned monster munch’, a description that any Americans in the audience probably thought was a cute example of self-deprecation. But to at least one person in the audience – me – it smacked of him thinking the film has a lack of ambition and that his part in it is probably not his finest day at the office.
Unfortunately, so it quickly proves. Kong: Skull Island – which arrives in cinemas a mere 12 years after Peter Jackson’s epic version – is a film that underwhelms in nearly every department. It spends large chunks of time looking awful (3D has done it no favours at all), the casting is uninspired, and that most vital component, the screenplay, is woefully short of polish and finesse, conspicuously managing, for large parts, to neither move nor amuse. I sat there stony-faced, if not quite for the duration then at least until John C Reilly – playing a World War II pilot who’s been marooned on Skull Island for 28 years – hoved into view. So an out-and-out-disaster, right? Yes, as far as most adult audiences are concerned, but it will keep bloodthirsty boys and girls modestly amused and it might, just possibly, lead to better things in the future. For this is a companion picture to Godzilla from 2014, and in three years or so is supposed to result in some super-sized showdown in Kong V Godzilla, an encounter that Japanese film-makers anticipated in 1962. But if it’s anything like this, I can wait a bit longer. At best, this feels like an illadvised homage to rickety B-movies, with old favourites such as One Million Years BC, The Lost World
and Journey To The Centre Of The Earth all coming to mind as we discover, quite rapidly, that while the world’s favourite gigantic ape may be the star, here he’s having to share his island stage with a whole raft of supporting monsters: a giant octopus, a spider the height of a building, a stick-insect as big as a tree and flesh-eating, dinosaur-like lizards that seem to come in assorted dimensions.
‘You don’t want to wake up the big one,’ someone inevitably says at one moment. Oops! But at least now we know that’s the third act taken care of.
Both in Merian C Cooper’s 1933 original (the Fay Wray, Empire State version) and Jackson’s 2005 remake (Naomi Watts, ditto) film-making was used as the excuse for a team to travel to the mysterious Skull Island.
Here, it’s complex pseudo-science that provides the way in, with new-specieshunter John Goodman and his Monarch team (Monarch also featured in Godzilla) travelling to the island in 1971 with an exSAS tracker (Hiddleston), a Vietnam War photographer (Brie Larson) and an entire US helicopter squadron led by Samuel L Jackson. One of the film’s mysteries is why the magnificently bearded Jordan VogtRoberts was brought in to direct, given that his track record is in modestly budgeted, indie-style films, not effects-heavy, would-be blockbusters. If it was to look after the actors while the visual-effects team looked after everything else, it’s an approach that doesn’t come off.
Hiddleston just about escapes with dignity intact but Larson – an Oscar winner, no less – is not so fortunate, playing a character predictably, and rightly, feistier and more feminist than her imperilled predecessors but singularly failing to light up the screen in the process. Until, that is, her big close-up scene with Kong himself, of course, which we all know is coming and, compared to so much else, isn’t bad when it finally arrives. Along with the scenestealing Reilly, it’s one of the reasons why this is a film that’s all about the final third.
It was Jackson’s screenwriters who originally picked up the echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness in the Kong story. Here Vogt-Roberts and his fourman writing team take that a step further, deliberately channelling Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam-era classic Apocalypse Now (based on Heart Of Darkness, of course) into the already clunky proceedings. This may seem clever but it doesn’t really work, and is certainly going to go straight over the heads of the film’s young target audience. Here the helicopter squadron attack is not to the sound of Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries but Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Kong, it turns out, is not a fan.
With visual effects that Ray Harryhausen wouldn’t feel intimidated by, and some downright poor supporting turns, this cheap-looking King Kong, alas, is the poorest of them all.
‘At best, this feels like an ill-advised homage to rickety B-movies such as One Million Years BC’