Review of Kong: Skull Island (2017) by Ethan J — 22 May 2017

This movie is dull, its lazy, it's poorly acted and written and lacks any real charm or true enjoyment value that excuses these flaws. While it does contain some interesting and inventive action, that small amount of satisfaction doesn't clean the slate of everything that came before it. You don't care about any of the characters and the movie just lacks a certain charm that makes it truly enjoyable. Vogt-Roberts does a decent job with the giant, climactic battle esc shots but fails at anything to do with talking or whatnot. Personally, I don't think you'll get your moneys worth with this movie and I can't see many people enjoying it that much.

There is no real story here and anything even related to it is quickly pushed aside. The 'plot' was just an excuse to get 'big things' fighting but even that is kept at a bare minimum and could have been done better.

Tom Hiddleston was FINE as James Conrad but you can tell he was phoning it in. Brie Larson was very weak as Mason Weaver and the man who is everything(Samuel L Jackon) was also really poor. Both of their characters didn't flow in one straight arc and neither of them really needed to exist. Both John C Reily and John Goodman were fine as John Marlow and Bill Randa respectively. The main issue with this movie is that none of the characters are likable and every attempt to make them appear human or relatable was so blatantly forced in. You may argue that this is KONG's movie but then why not make him the complete priority and not focus on any of the humans.

Vogt-Roberts does a great job at shooting the huge scenes to do with Kong in this movie but fails drastically at any scenes that try to involve human emotion or contact or happiness. To this movie's credit, however, all the effects were pretty good(even if I feel they could have been a little more creative at points).

This movie's main strength is the cool and inventive action. While this is well done, it's so short lived and the setup to it doesn't live up to the climax. I understand that it would probably get repetitive if the whole movie was just Kong fighting but they could have either added more or made the actual climax feel more powerful. Any and all attempts at humour in this movie backfired. This movie's primary directive would have been to properly introduce Kong to this Monster-verse and to younger audiences. I personally feel that it failed at this goal and could have been handled so much better and so much more creatively.

On a side note, the final scene of this movie were John Goodman goes home is shot like it's genuine footage and if the text 'Based on a True Story' popped on screen at that moment in time, I would have gave this movie a perfect score because that would have been amazing.

In conclusion, this movie is dull, the characters are boring and the climax doesn't live up to the hype set up by the movie. I don't feel like this movie is worth any money and is just not worth watching.

4/10.

Wouldn't Recommend.