Skull Island: Just monkeying around

KONG: SKULL ISLAND Direction: Jordan VogtRoberts Actors: Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L Jackson Rating: HH

He has held sway over filmgoers for 84 years. In the latest retelling of the King Kong legend, the gargantuan gorilla goes ape again.

Unfortunately director Jor- dan Vogt-Roberts, making the leap to a big-budget blockbuster after his indie debut The Kings of Summer (2013), can’t match the white-knuckle excitement of the iconic black-and-white original (1933) or even the retellings by John Guillermin (1976) and Peter Jackson (2005).

Jettisoning the usual beautythat-killed-the-beast subtext, the script offers up a supremely silly origins backstory instead.

The tale unfolds mainly on an uncharted island in South Pacific towards the end of the Vietnam War. A team of explorers has ventured deep into this tropical ‘paradise’, Skull Island, on a mapping mission. The expedition is led by a seasoned tracker (Tom Hiddleston) and includes a veteran soldier (Samuel L Jackson), a shady government official (John Goodman) and the obligatory female, photojournalist (Brie Larson).

The men-vs-monsters mayhem is orchestrated with an overload of digital trickery. Aided by motion-capture technology, Terry Notary is quite expressive as the alpha predator.

The only other notable performance is by John C Reilly. As is de rigueur for this kind of tent-pole escapist entertainment, the end credits provide a teaser for more monster smackdowns in the near future. Hopefully they will have more of a tale to tell.