Rating of
1.5/4
Shock the Monkey to Life!
Filmhaus - wrote on 04/11/21
I truly love predictable actioners, the sort that make no sense and wink at you to let you know you're allowed to check your brain in at the door.
However, this one refused to wink.
Even when the title character was being defibrillated by flying airbus, the soundtrack refused to play Peter Gabriel.
Instead, the whole time it was making unblinking eye contact and telling me I should be taking this very, very seriously. That's a dangerous suggestion, given that the visuals broadcast the film is not a comedy and the script makes no sense.
As it was, I spent the whole film trying to absorb both, which is difficult because the film puts them in competition with each other.
To point, either the script or the visuals could be missing, and you can still follow the plot, but with both together it's madness.
For instance, the script assumes the audience is suffering from a concussion and has the main characters narrate the plot as it happens ("Look, there he is! No, he's over here!").
In addition, it doesn't trust you to follow simple character motivations (like "I'm a sassy teen" or "I'm the evil corporate villain"), so it also replays those on a 10 minute loop.
While that saves the script from wasting fighting time on character development, the characters are very generic archetypes to begin with, so there's no one to care about which robs the movie of suspense.
On the other end, the visuals are spectacular, but they take place mostly in the dark unlike Gojira or Roland Emmerich's Godzilla, which lends a unnecessary level of ennui to the subject matter.
The scene settings themselves contribute to this weightiness because a good chunk of the film happens in the paranoid corners of the military industrial complex, and the main characters speak with drawn-out gravitas in poorly lit shadows.
Whereas Gojira had something to say about the dangers of nuclear energy, this film doesn't really have a sustained theme to accompany the long, serious slog of dialogue-heavy scenes, most of which are exposition to create a rationale for the shared universe of its titular characters.
However, this works at cross purposes because the script overtly engages the audience with logic contradicted by the visuals.
For instance, after the movie spends a half hour boating/air-mailing Kong to the South Pole (ship the monkey to life), it is explained very thoroughly that the (hollow) earth is 2 miles deep in Antarctica, so much so that the sound barrier must be broken to penetrate its boundaries.
However, scenes later, access to the same area is shown to be 200 feet deep in metro China, so shallow that Kong can climb up in 10 minute or less.
Another crazy reveal is that Kong knows sign language (*gasp) and has hidden it from everyone but the hearing-impaired girl (*gasp*gasp) with whom he constantly communicates.
However, at the beginning of the movie, we are told that his every waking moment is being watched on camera by a sign-language specialist, which means she was apparently out of the room every time she left her adopted kid to sign with the giant, feral monkey.
But I digress.
In the plus column of this film, the visual effects are staggeringly beautiful, on the same level as Guillermo Del Toro's Pacific Rim or Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch.
However, I didn't much care for Sucker Punch either, primarily for the same reason.
In the end, I don't expect movies like this to make sense, but they should wink at me more if they're this silly so I don't try to take them seriously.
