Monster ruck
GODZILLA VS KONG (12A) ★★☆☆☆
BILLED as the ultimate showdown between behemoth brawlers, director Adam Wingard’s monster-mashing smackdown is a ridiculously one-sided affair.
Logic, not a quality cherished by screenwriters Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein, dictates the outcome when a reptilian contender with atomic breath that cuts through metal rumbles with a chest-beating rival armed with banana breath.
Dr Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) works for secret scientific organisation Monarch on Skull Island, safely containing Kong inside a hi-tech dome where her deaf ward Jia (Kaylee Hottle) secretly communicates with the prize specimen using sign language.
Discredited former Monarch scientist Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgard), implores Ilene to let him transport Kong to Antarctica to prove his crackpot theory about a hollow earth ecosystem at our planet’s core.
The mission is bank-rolled by Walter Simmons (Demian Bichir), chief executive of Apex Cybernetics, who believes this hidden world could unlock a power source for mankind.
Needless to say, his motives are not totally altruistic.
Meanwhile in a superfluous subplot, spunky teenager Madison Russell (Millie Bobby Brown), daughter of Monarch’s deputy director of special projects (Kyle Chandler), unravels the Apex conspiracy with a classmate (Julian Dennison) and conspiracy theorist (Brian Tyree Henry).
Bombastic action sequences bludgeon character development into submission.
The titular death match is conducted as two eye-popping bouts roughly an hour apart, one of which asks us to believe a US Navy aircraft carrier could support the combined weight of the title fighters.
Godzilla Vs Kong has just one emotional string to its bow, the bond between cherubic Jia and the ape, and scriptwriters Pearson and Borenstein pluck it frantically between overblown set pieces.
■ Available on Premium Video On Demand now