What a MONSTER MESS Ta
by This battle of the beasts is devoid of thrills, tension and fun – but Kung Fu Panda’s high jinks are perfect family fare for the holidays
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (12A, 115 mins) Verdict: Monstrously pointless ) ****
Kung Fu Panda 4 (PG, 94 mins)
Verdict: Easy to bear )))** Robot Dreams (G, 102 mins) Verdict: Hilarious and sad ))))*
AT THE end of a week of football internationals, the nation’s multiplexes welcome Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. This seems fitting, somehow. On paper, Godzilla and Kong are a formidable attacking partnership, but the reality is that they’re not team players.
A harsher reality is that Adam Wingard’s film is not very good. It’s a sequel to the same director’s Godzilla v Kong (2021), which wasn’t much cop, either, but at least it didn’t make a monkey out of its audience.
This time we’re expected to swallow a load of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook, spouted by Rebecca Hall and Dan Stevens — almost as if they understand what they’re talking about when they bang on about dorsal plates and plasma readings — basically filling time before the next thunderous punch-up between snarling CGI beasts.
It rapidly becomes exceptionally dull. This is a film largely devoid of thrills, tension, fun and even basic coherence.
The computer-generated effects are workaday at best, and the story’s principal baddie, a gigantic primate capable of wiping the floor even with the mighty Kong, merely reminded me of a supersized King Louie, The Jungle Book’s rascally jungle VIP.
What passes for a narrative has Kong lumbering around the primordial paradise known as Hollow Earth, which looks like it rose from Jurassic Park’s cuttingroom floor, while Godzilla kicks off in the Eternal City, smashing what’s left of the Colosseum with one misplaced stamp of a great scaly foot.
Whose idea it was to place him in Rome I cannot say, but evidently someone with a distaste for ancient monuments plotted this film, because he and Kong later turn up in Cairo in Egypt, inconsiderately bumping into the pyramids.
Meanwhile, Dr Ilene Andrews (Hall) and her two tiresome wisecracking pals, Trapper (Stevens) and Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry), gradually work out that her adopted daughter, Jia (Kaylee Hottle), is not just the only surviving member of the indigenous Iwi tribe from Skull Island, whence Kong originates; or the only human being who can converse with the big guy and stop him going ape.
No, the fearless mute teenager is also the only person who can infiltrate another lost civilisation and raise a messianic monster (OK, a massive bat) from its slumbers, in time to help both our clumsy globetrotters as they unite to defeat King Louie.
For some reason this almighty scrap takes place in Rio de Janeiro. Maybe the producers had an eye on the South American box-office.
Whatever, while everything goes nuts in Brazil, you will almost certainly
wonder why you bothered at all.
■ KUNG FU PANDA 4 offers a more worthwhile set of animal high jinks. This DreamWorks animation is billed as the long-awaited (although not by anyone I know) follow-up to 2016’s Kung Fu Panda 3 and has some of the illustrious voice cast from the previous films (Jack Black, Bryan Cranston, Dustin Hoffman, Ian McShane) with the additions of Viola Davis and Awkwafina. This time, Po the panda (Black) finds he must step down as the Dragon Warrior, and choose a successor before he takes up his new job as Spiritual Leader of the Valley of Peace.
The trouble is, he likes being Dragon Warrior. And on top of that, there’s an evil, shape-shifting chameleon (Davis) to fight, in which formidable pursuit he teams up with a shifty fox (Awkwafina) and heads off to crime-ridden Juniper City.
The anthropomorphism is neatly done and there are some terrific gags, both verbal and visual (the city’s police force are bulls, so naturally we see them blundering through a china shop). It’s perfect family fare in time for the school holidays.
■ AS WITH Kung Fu Panda 4, there are no humans in Robot Dreams. Another animation, exquisitely written and directed by Pablo Berger, it is set in New York City in the 1980s, a seedy metropolis populated entirely by animals. Our hero is a lonely dog, who finds companionship in a mail-order robot, which he builds from a kit.
Joyously funny, achingly sad, gorgeously observed, it’s a (dialogue-free) delight from beginning to end. But note that the two-dimensional animation is deliberately basic, evocative of early Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
This lovely film is more likely to appeal to nostalgic grown-ups than sophisticated kids, raised on Pixar movies. Happy Easter!