Wretched excess.
You may have seen “King Kong” last weekend at the box office, but those two words explain why this “film” will probably underperform expectations.
Wretched excess.
Where to begin?
Oh, yes, the horribly long, dull and cliched boat trip from New York to Skull Island, located somewhere south of Singapore–apparently only a couple days’ sail from New York City! In this tepid 60 minutes, we are introduced to a slew of warmed-over characters, not just from the original “Kong” but from movie history.
There’s the down-on-her-luck starlet wannabe Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), who has far too nice of teeth for being broke during the Great Depression.
There’s the stoic captain and first mate on the ship.
There’s the P.T. Barnum-like director Carl Denham (Jack Black), who lies to everyone to get what he wants.
There’s the writer (Adrien Brody, looking like he wants out of this flick), who’s too stupid to realize he’s on a moving boat.
There are the dinosaurs ripped off of a “Jurassic Park” screen.
There are the “natives” on Skull Island who clearly have dropped in from “The Lord of the Rings.”
On and on it goes.
Some critics say this movie has the greatest special effects ever seen. Hooey. The shack city in Central Park looks like a cartoon against the modern-day skyline.
The dinosaurs are almost cartoonlike, and the real photography hardly meshes with what’s clearly CGI effects.
Wretched excess.
Peter Jackson is guilty of the director’s “just because I can” crime. Some exhibits, your honor:
– A brontosaurus stampede. Why’d they stampede? Who knows. But it went on forever, until they tumbled together like a snowy night on the Hillside Strangler.
– The T-Rex fight sequence. OK, one on one with Kong might have been too easy a fight for the big ape, and I enjoyed it when the second big dino appeared, but three on one? After it appears that he has beaten all three, I actually yelled “C’mon!” when Jackson concocted a way to make the fight last another five minutes.
– When the ship’s crew tries to save Darrow, they fall into a pit of the creepiest, most disgusting insects you could ever think of, including one pink thing with claws. It’s a horrifying scene, but it’s no fun. Unlike a horror movie, this is just hand-over-your-eyes sickly, and, like the rest of the movie, it’s too damn long.
– Moments after breaking free in New York and finding his “beauty,” Kong enters Central Park and turns into Bambi, sliding around on a pond. I could almost hear Barney’s “I Love You” song.
Wretched excess.
As someone who really enjoyed the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, I had high hopes for “Kong.”
But where the source material for that series was deep and fascinating, the original “Kong” was barely more than 90 minutes.
If Jackson had cut an hour of obnoxious, over-the-top effects, plot holes the size of Skull Island (how’d they get the ape back when he was bigger than their boat?) and amateurish acting, this might have been a great film–entertaining, moving even.
Instead, it joins “The Hulk,” “Star Wars: Episode 2” and “The Matrix” sequels as movies with vast potential that were destroyed by having too many computers–and too little heart.
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polsen@tribune.com
