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Just monkeying around: Kong - Skull Island review by Rashid Irani
The giant ape is awe-inspiring; the digital effects are plentiful. What’s missing is a plot.
KONG: SKULL ISLAND
Direction: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Actors: Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L Jackson
Rating: 2 / 5
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 Jordan 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 beauty-that-killed-the-beast subtext, the script offers up a supremely silly origins backstory instead.
The tale unfolds mainly on an uncharted island in the South Pacific towards the end of the Vietnam War, where …Skull Island unleashes a menagerie of monstrous critters as well as the majestic primate, effectively awe-inspiring.
A team of explorers has ventured deep into this tropical ‘paradise’, on a mapping mission. It does not take long for them to discover that they have stumbled into the realm of the colossal Kong.
The expedition is led by a seasoned tracker (Tom Hiddleston) and includes a veteran soldier (the ubiquitous Samuel L Jackson), a shady government official (John Goodman) and the obligatory female, this time a photojournalist (Brie Larson, the Oscar-winner from Room, merely cashing a cheque).
The men-vs-monsters mayhem is orchestrated with an overload of digital trickery. The puny humans are snapped up as snacks by the titular chimp and the rest of the supersized creepy-crawlies.
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 the American pilot stranded on the island ever since his plane crash-landed during the Second World War.
There are snatches of period-specific songs by David Bowie and Credence Clearwater Revival.
As is de rigueur for this kind of tent-pole escapist entertainment, the end credits provide a teaser for more monster smack-downs in the near future. Hopefully they will have more of a tale to tell.
Watch the trailer for Kong: Skull Island here