When hairy met scaly, jaws snap and skulls crack
These guys. You just want to see them happy.
It’s hard to be so alone, and angry, caught up in an ancient Hatfieldand-McCoy grudge up on Earth’s inhospitable surface. Nothing comes easily up there, among the nattering human species, when you just want to go home to Hollow Earth, where (as Robert Frost said) they have to take you in, and you settle your differences with a jaw snap or a skull-crack. No exposition, no explanations.
Well into “Godzilla vs. Kong,” a solid roundhouse punch and the fourth film in the current run of Legendary Entertainment’s “MonsterVerse” franchise, we travel to the wondrous ecosystem at Earth’s core, where gravity goes flooey, and Kong finally comes to know the green, green grass of home. It’s not exactly a lyric interlude; it’s just a minute or so of peace before it’s killing time again.
Ever since 2014’s “Godzilla,” the MonsterVerse movies have focused more and more on pure action. After the perpetual rain and dim lighting of “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (2019), the open-air panoramas of “Godzilla vs. Kong” are most welcome, even if the human storylines struggle for attention against the title characters’ idea of abrupt urban redevelopment.
Both Godzilla and Kong have a hold on our collective sympathies. It’s no spoiler (it’s in the trailer) to point out that eventually these two must set aside their differences, in Hong Kong, to combat a common human-made enemy: Mechagodzilla.
The script comes from Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein. Rebecca Hall plays an anthropological linguist overseeing Kong’s “Truman Show”like existence under human surveillance on Skull Island. Her adopted daughter, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), has a special bond with Kong, as the nominal male lead — the geologist and well-meaning doof played by Alexander Skarsgard— soon learns.
The weaselly billionaire head of Apex Cybernetics (Demian Bichir) sends his sharklike daughter (Eiza Gonzalez) to manipulate the activities of the do-gooders played by Hall and Skarsgard. Meantime, the daughter (Millie Bobby Brown) of a Monarch scientist (Kyle Chandler, perpetually on the outskirts) pokes around the Apex laboratory with a corporate whistleblower and underground podcaster (Brian Tyree Henry) and a fellow Godzilla nerd (Julian Dennison). Their scenes strain for laughs and tend to restate the same question: Why is Godzilla, humankind’s frenemy par excellence, in such a bad, destructive mood all of a sudden?
The big scenes make the movie. Director Adam Wingard sets them up efficiently. About 45 minutes in, Kong squares off against Godzilla. After the Hollow Earth excursion, the Hong Kong climax sets up a two-against-one bout, and it’s a rouser.
The battles are exciting, reasonably brutal but not sadistic. Neither Kong nor Godzilla constitutes a bad guy in any sense; they’re just misunderstood. The relationship between Jia and Kong offers the film’s only real grace notes, at once shameless and touching.
Even if “Godzilla vs. Kong” feels more a tad more mecha than human, it satisfies nonetheless. The MonsterVerse remains a better-thanaverage franchise, pulling enough variations on its theme of Titans, clashing, to keep on keepin’ on.
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MPAA rating: PG-13 (intense sequences of creature violence/ destruction and brief language)
Running time: 1:53 Where to watch: Now in theaters and on HBO Max