Hawaii.
That’s the only answer I can come up with as to how so many talented actors decided, after reading the script for “Kong: Skull Island” (except for Sam Jackson who apparently just looks at the title and decides “that’ll do me”) to jump on board. “Stupid monster movie featuring a big Gorilla and a plot that someone wrote on the back of a fagbox while they were pissed but, hold on a minute, they’re filming it in Hawaii!! Yeah!!! I’m so there!!!”. Or at least that’s how I imagine their thought processes went.
The film itself is quite probably the perfect encapsulation of all that is wrong and cynical about blockbuster movies today. It’s trying to enlarge a franchise (a “Monsterverse” they’re calling it). It’s got a token Chineses actress in a redundant role because, you know, China’s a big market now. It’s hired as many well known names as it can in an effort to feign creative legitimacy.
It is, most of all though, unimaginative. To call it “patchy” would be underservedly kind. It is a smorgasbord of tones and styles, a swap meet of ideas and influences. There’s an indelicate sprinkling of “Apocalypse Now”, an unwieldy fistful of “Moby Dick”, a generous dollop of nuclear paranoia. The mood sways back and forth between tongue-in-cheek humour and ill advised pathos.
The only one who really stands out in all this is John C. Reilly. The reason you see so much of him in the trailer is because he’s the best thing about the film even though he only shows up half way through proceedings. He plays Hank Marlow, an American WWII pilot who crashes on a remote island in the Pacific. Nearly thirty years later he meets up with an expeditionary team led by Bill Randa (Goodman), the head of secret government agency Monarch, and Colonel Preston Packard (Jackson), a Vietnam veteran who still has a bitter taste in his mouth over the way the war ended.
It turns out the island is home to a rich ecological system that includes enormous buffalo, huge spiders and, you guessed it, a gargantuan Gorilla. Randa suspected the island might hold a few secrets but didn’t expect to find prehistoric behemoths wandering around. As a result the team are attacked by Kong after dropping a series of charges and end up scattered about the island. They have a few days to reach the northern tip to rendezvous with their boat out but that might not be enough given the variety and multitude of the hazards in their way.
And that’s pretty much it.
Samuel Jackson spouts nonsense about Icarus, John Goodman is utterly wasted, Tom Hiddlestone and Brie Larson (ostensibly the stars) have very little to contribute until the final act and there’s at least a dozen other characters who wander in and out of scenes without having anything to really say or do. People are killed with a randomness that suggests a dice was involved. It’s impossible to relate to or empathize with anyone.
Monster movies are simple fare. All people want to see are big monsters fighting each other or destroying cities (preferably both). Unfortunately Hollywood seems to think we need to have humans getting in the way. When the Monster on Monster action finally arrived I was too anaesthetised by the 90 minutes of tedium that preceded it to really enjoy it.
A surefire dud.
DIRECTOR: Jordan Vogt-Roberts
RUNNING TIME: 118 Mins
RATING: 12A
STARRING: John C. Reilly. Everybody else in Hollywood.
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