King Kong
(dir. Peter Jackson)
The biggest chimp of the all, revamped by the LOTR crew.
For some reason it's taken a while to get round to this super-ape outing here at chimp HQ, so it's nice to finally open up the DVD (although there's 2 bullshit ads included as part of the "extras" on my R3 copy).
Like what Peter Jackson's done over his career, and there's some nice touches to his monster/gore past which I wasn't expecting in the Skull Island bits (been so long since I saw the original that the plot was basically new to me).
Jack Black's money-making movie director works well in the first half, although you do get the impression that Jackson sympathises with his blagging skills and general enthusiasm for getting a film made, which does seem to jar a bit with the second half in New York, with Black then the evil maestro putting on Kong's Broadway debut.
Naomi Watts does the most with her scream and faint routine, and gets the compassion for Kong over without saying too much. It's much more of a human getting on with a wild animal relationship than some inter-species romance. She's like a friendly zoologist with juggling skills that he's stumbled across. You feel like Kong's pretty lonely on the island without any other giant apes around, and that Naomi's better company than the local savages who seem more interested in keeping in chucking him the occasional sacrifice from behind a wall. Adrien Brody's ok, but a bit sidelined towards the end.
The Kong animation/acting from Andy "Gollum" Serkis (who's also the ship's cook) is pretty cool, wasn't expecting so much dinosaur bashing which seemed like Jackson having fun with some Godzilla-style showdowns, and the crew of the Venture are at least pretty wowed when they first come across all these huge mythical beasts running around. All the whooping natives stuff is a bit odd, not quite sure where they're going with that.
Enjoyed it overall, but it did feel a touch overlong for what's essentially a pretty simple B movie plot - although holding off on Kong's entrance works, and all the on-board scenes build up to Skull Island's sighting.
Could have been a much more intense, wham-bam experience at 20 minutes shorter: just because it's a really big monkey doesn't mean it has to be a really big epic… but hey, it's a big monkey smashing up New York and punching out dinosaurs - that's always going to go down well here.
30th Apr 2006 - Tumblr
3.5