Review of Kong: Skull Island (2017) by Patrick D — 30 Jul 2017

This is a very ok movie, an aggressively ok movie in fact. It's one of those films that just happens and leaves you feeling neither massively thrilled nor particularly involved at any point as it fly's by, you are just left with a slightly sluggish feeling of "oh...that was alright I guess, could have spent two hours doing something better though". It's a shame because everything pointed to something great, the trailers were great, the cinematography is beautiful, the cast is terrific and the concept of Vietnam era soldiers going to skull island and trying to survive is cool as hell (this also, weirdly gives us two genre movies this year, the other being War For The Planet Of The Apes about angry apes and.

a heavily Apocalypse Now referencing, anti-war plot) but it's like someone took a bunch of lovely, awesome sounding ingredients to turn into a big dinner that surely is going to be tasty as fuck, except they mix the ingredients wrong and under/overcook the whole thing into something bland and sludgy that goes down ok and has a few moments when the flavor pops but just could have been something much more interesting. The action is so overdone, with cgi that is all over the place in terms of quality, that it starts to get a bit boring to look at even when a giant gorilla is smashing helicopters, theres no real weight to any of it. At points you have a 300 foot ape fighting a 200 foot reptilian monster, and yet the cgi removes any of the impact or sense of awe, gravity or any kind of tactile feel to what is happening on screen, it's action filmmaking for 15 year olds raised on hyper A.D.D computer games, it's frequently very un-cinematic. Another t annoyance is how wasted the great cast is, John Goodman, Toby Kebble, Sam Jackson and Brie Larson are all given very very little to do, especially Tom Hiddleson, who is supposed to be the Jack Colton/Indiana Jones style hero of the story and yet is almost never involved in the action in the movie and ends up having no baring on the plot, you could digitally remove him from every moment and not notice. The only member of the cast who is given a bit of something to chew on is the great John C Riley, who is the absolute standout element of the whole film, he is funny, sweet and his story is much more engaging and even a little moving than anything else here, in fact the whole movie would have been really amazing if it had just been a barking mad Riley and an island full of monsters. But if you boil it all down you still get some good bits and pieces, lots of creatures (though still not nearly enough, how can you have a bunch of people wade through a swamp on a dinosaur/monster filled island and not have something scary in there waiting to eat them?) and some fun action, plus some elements of pleasing nuttiness that add some kick to stale modern blockbuster tropes, like all the 70's ear nods and jokes (the Richard Nixon bobble head is a great quirky, satirical touch) and a dark sense of humor, plus a few scnes of proper grisly, nasty horror, like bamboo legged giant spider and one soldiers surprisingly horrific fate) so a long way from being bad, but an even longer way from being anything to write home about, a shame.