Movie Review: Peter Jackson’s King Kong

King Klunk
by Chris Blake Sasser

And the prophet said “And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as One dead.”

Old Arabian Proverb

The King is dead. But this time, beauty didn’t kill the beast. No, self indulgence killed the beast this time out.
I wanted to like this movie. I really did. I’m a long time Kong fan and I have a lot of respect for Peter Jackson. He did the unprecedented, the impossible with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And the man truly loves and respects the original King Kong. It is the film that inspired him to become a filmmaker in the first place. If anyone could re-imagine Kong and produce a worthy retelling of the classic tale, it would have to be Jackson.

Witness the painstaking care with which he re-created the spider pit sequence in the original Kong for the recent DVD special edition. The work that went into accurately recreating this lost holy grail of a scene is impressive. And the finished sequence is an astonishing master work of filmmaking that brought tears to my eyes.

But this new 200 million dollar remake of King Kong comes up short on practically every level. As written by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the film is oddly flat and uninvolving. The epic feel is forced and the action set pieces stop the film dead in its already lumbering tracks…and they go on and on, bludgeoning the viewer with horrible CGI effects work and lacking the good sense of when to end. They seem to exist only because they can. And everything is repeated at least twice. To quote a bored youngster I overheard in the audience: “Oh look. They’re running from dinosaurs. Again.”

Everything about this bloated film is contrived. I’m willing to accept giant gorillas, dinosaurs…you name it. But when you’re making a fantastic film of this sort, you have to play by the rules of the universe you’ve created. I won’t accept a green young sailor blasting bugs off a jiggling Adrien Brody with a Tommy gun. No way. I won’t accept Kong roughly jostling Naomi Watts around the way he does without snapping her neck.

We never get a good look at Skull Island…let alone the mountain from which the island takes its namesake. The natives are frightening savages who appear to be leftover Orcs from Jackson’s Rings trilogy. After their initial appearance, they disappear from the film never to be seen again. Strange.

Then there’s the star of the show. The film opens with a loving close-up shot of a real primate in a New York zoo. I felt this was a ballsy move, as Jackson must really believe his Kong to be a completely convincing creation. But sadly, Kong never comes across as anything more than exactly what he is: an animated blurb of computer trickery. And a noisy one at that.

The rest of the cast struggles with a host of under-written cardboard characterizations lacking motivation and character-arcs. Adrien Brody is miscast as a heroic lead. He works pretty well as the starry-eyed playwright, but it’s completely unbelievable when he turns into an indestructible Indiana Jones wanna-be.

Jack Black as Carl Denham is straddled with a character whose motivations are, unlike the original’s, never made totally clear. There is never any pay-off to this character, or any other in the film for that matter. Particularly poorly conceived is Kyle Chandler’s Bruce Baxter character. Baxter is a self-absorbed pretty boy movie star who one minute is a coward running for his life, then the next, proves himself heroic. Cut to a few scenes later and he’s a sniveling coward again.

And then there’s Naomi Watts as Ann Darrow. She’s the perfect choice for this role. She possesses a timeless beauty that captures the essence of everything Ann Darrow should be. Too bad there’s very little for her to do. This is hard to believe given that the film runs some three hours. A three hours that feels like five. By the time we get to the island, kids are running around the theater in complete boredom throwing popcorn and I’m thinking to myself, “Christ, we still have all the dinosaur fights AND New York to get through yet.”