Review of Kong: Skull Island (2017) by Llamayarmybar — 12 Jul 2017

An embarrassing wet fart of a film. Absolutely boring monster designs, seriously a bipedal lizard? That's all you could come up with? It ends up trying to connect itself to "Pacific Rim" or something with the whole "Hollow Earth" theory they introduce one quarter of the way into the plot.

Speaking of which, what is even happening in this movie? Everything goes wrong because of the humans arriving, Kong is never captured, just yelled at by Samuel L. Jackson for the entire breadth of the movie.

Other acting talent is totally wasted here including Jon Goodman, who granted is a heck of a lot better than say, Jack Black, but isn't well developed. I found Kong himself to be fairly boring, especially when compared to 2005's Peter Jackson's "Kong" film, he was just on the island as was John C.

Reilly as I suppose comedic support in a movie that didn't need it. I suppose I ought to chalk most of the lack-there-of of charm was mostly due to the period, the 70's just doesn't work here, and it paints the military as these stereotypical grunts that are apparently all Vietnam vets too.

Everyone in this movie is a veteran too! How about that? How inclusive of Hollywood. The only real highlight here, is some average performances, a bizarre giant spider battle, more-so with a focus on giant spider "legs" and a couple interesting entirely computer animated Kong fighting a lizard-thing battles.

I suppose if that's all you wanted, and don't care about any people in this movie, then you can join me in being utterly confused as to why we even spend so much time with once again, totally wooden, boring, poorly developed characters.

Its been done a billion times, we see this in every monster movie, why do they keep writing characters like this? At least, the Peter Jackson contribution had a focus, not an amazing one, not a stupendous one, but it at least showed very human performances, especially between the big ape himself and his beautiful self-imposed damsel in distress, Naomi Watts.

You can argue that they're both not amazing films, but I could always go back and find something "fun" or engaging in 2005's rendition over this burning dog turd of a film. As it stands, the very original King Kong is still a great film and I'd still watch that before going to see another terrible attempt at a re-boot or a remake or whatever Hollywood wants to call this poor excuse for a film.