Kong Ain't King

"Here is the jaw-dropping, eye-popping, heart-stopping movie epic we've been waiting for all year."

-Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, in his review of King Kong

So apparently the much-deserved goodwill Peter Jackson earned with The Lord of the Rings is strong enough for most critics to turn a blind eye to the mess that is Jackson's King Kong remake. Loud, unfocused and half-baked, King Kong presumes that you love the original as much as he does, and that the visual wonder that is Kong will carry you through this bloated epic. Make no mistake - Kong himself is really something. But at $200 million and a three-hour running time, I think we all deserved something more than an extended FX workshop.

Jackson is a master of staging action sequences, but even the big set pieces in King Kong feel forced and inconsequential. The audience is constantly called upon to suspend not just disbelief but simple logic (and yes, there is a difference, even in a fantasy picture). The film is divided into three distinct sections: 1) the journey to Skull Island (inexplicably drawn out for nearly an hour), 2) Skull Island (where lots of innocent dudes risk their lives - why?), and 3) Kong in New York. It doesn't help that you know what's coming every single step of the way. It also doesn't help that the script is nothing more than a few pages of hokey dialogue sandwiched between some (apparently) detailed descriptions of whatever mayhem ensues next.

I have no investment in the source material, and I get the impression that it's nearly required to enjoy this stuff. There are supposedly dozens of "homages" to the original tucked away, including some borderline racist depictions of "natives" on Skull Island (if George "Jar-Jar" Lucas portrayed them this way, the PC police would have his head). Beyond Kong, many of the effects look cheap and unfinished - you saw exactly the same dinosaur stuff in Jurassic Park (and frankly, it looked about the same a decade ago).

Did I like anything? I liked the monkey-meets-girl heart of the film (Naomi Watts is terrific), but that gets only a fraction of serious screen time. Maybe if had been 90 minutes shorter, I'd have been more forgiving.

In many ways, Kong was precisely what I expected - a giant monkey movie. Nothin' wrong with that. But Jackson has mistakenly assumed that we all agree that Kong is a story on par with, say, The Lord of the Rings. It ain't, and Peter Jackson's King Kong isn't the modern masterpiece that Peter Travers would have you believe.