If you like special effects you certainly get your $10 worth with the new King Kong. Make no mistake about it. King Kong IS a special effects movie and director Peter Jackson never lets you forget it. Now if it only had a script, some dialogue worth listening to and a little better casting; Jackson might have the mega hit he was looking for. Instead what he gets is three hours and seven minutes of mostly top notch special effects covering up some very bad special effects.
The premise of King Kong is of course the ultimate Beauty & the Beast story. The problem is Fay Wray still rules in the 1933 version. You can’t top it no matter how hard you try and adding color and digitalization to it doesn’t make it any better. It just makes it different. Indeed it makes it pale in comparison.
The special effects are really wonderful for most of the film. The close-ups of Kong are tremendous and the ape shows some pretty good emotion. He could have shown more. I mean c’mon was he getting scale?! The Ape looked like he was going through the motions, rather than the e-motions.
The fight scenes were pretty strong but when King Kong goes Jackie Chan on a pair of unsuspecting T-Rex --- well, martial arts aside, it was quite laughable. I totally thought the other monsters on Skull Island were overdone. The spiders and the other creepy crawlies had way too much to do. Cutting their scenes by two-thirds wouldn’t have hurt at all.
The shots of Kong and the Babe playfully fooling around on the frozen pond in New York were really cool, and they made you not only laugh but start to enjoy this long, and I do mean LONG film. Then the army comes in and screws it up for everyone.
The first 20 minutes were strong and the set design was a pleasure. As the film moved along, and c’mon everybody knows the story so we’re not telling tales out of school here, it got kinda hokey. The thing which bothered me was simple. The powerful special effects were blended with crappy special effects and to cover those crappy special effects the shots were made tight. So tight as to make them blur hoping you didn’t notice because the action was predominant. Maybe Jackson was thinking “if we go fast enough maybe nobody will notice.” Nah, it was just a blur.
Naomi Watts can act. Although, she didn’t have to in this picture. She just had to look good, emote some facial expressions and well, look good to the ape. You see after the first hour and 30 minutes, she didn’t utter a full sentence longer than ONE word. The word was “NOOOOOOO!” All she did was moan, scream, yell no, look sexy, look vulnerable, scream, moan yell no and well, you get the picture. She had no dialogue.
Adriene Brody was a nice piece of casting though. He came off very well for a guy with very few lines. Again he had to use a lot of facial expression but had more lines in 30 minutes probably than Watts had in the entire film.
The casting of Jack Black as producer/con man/promoter Carl Denham wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. You waited for that last key line in the film. You know the one. You waited and waited for him to utter those immortal words. And he threw them away!! Shame on you, Jack. Shame. This was your big chance to redeem this film. Blame Jackson if you will.
The one thing this film does is lets you see how far we’ve come from the 1930’s. Here I’m not talking about the special effects, but rather the words “politically correct.” In 1930 it was perfectly alright to allow airplanes to attack a giant ape on top of the Empire State Building, shooting their way with bullets landing where ever they land, missing half the time and watching them riddle New York City. Today can you imagine the furor if the government sent planes over NYC to shoot at King Kong? It would take an act of congress. Somebody would be sent into negotiate with the Kong and talk him down before they shot him.
Denham walks away when the monkey is dead at the end without much of a care in both versions. Today he’d be shaking in his boots at the liability for all the damage Kong did. After all, he brought him to town for the big party and Lloyds of London probably wouldn’t insure this type of stage play. The lawsuits would force the man to put a gun to his head. Which, by the way, should have happened about two hours into this laugher?
Oh, and it was a nice touch shooting the NYC scenes in the dead of winter with the snow covered ground and Kong slippin’ and slidin’ down 46th Street. There were some really great special effects of the ape charging through town at this point. It was only muddled by the bad special effects of the Kong carrying Beauty up the tall building. It got way too hokey at that point with her stiff doll like body not even halfway believable.
Now here is the kicker. It is the heart of winter, the girl is wearing a silky sleeveless evening dress with T-Straps and after an hour of running around she is standing on top of the Empire State Building. Could she have the decency to have just one goose bump. How about some redness in her cheeks? She’s half frozen in real life. No she’d have a broken neck in real life from being tossed about at “break neck” speeds by Kong, but let’s move on. Peter, just make her look a little cold. We’ll understand but even with make believe you have to make it so the audience believes.
I’m sure at 3:07:00 they probably cut the scenes where the crew actually brings King Kong back to NY after they capture him. So we do understand why they didn’t show him crossing the ocean on a raft. It would not have made much sense anyway due to the way they got him down. They could have kept it in if Jackson would have cut some of the Skull Island chases.
There was a really funny and very clever part where the vegetarian Brontosaurus’ were running from the meat eaters and stumbling all over themselves. This is really a superb section of the film. You can seriously imagine this happening after watching it. There likely were stampedes in prehistoric times where exactly this sort of thing happened and
Jackson and his special effects crew captured it with brilliance.
It doesn’t make up for the rest of this bomb though. Too bad, too. It might just encourage more film makers to take the tact, “We can make a lot of money by taking an old action film and re-doing it with today’s special effects.” We hope not. There is much more out there waiting to be made if studios will just take a few inexpensive chances instead of putting their money into expensive duds like this one.
Oh and in case you missed it. Yes, Peter Jackson did cast his two kids, Billy and Katie, as a couple of street urchins on the streets of NY. They were in the Lord of the Rings films too. Nepotism. It’s a Hollywood thing even in New Zealand. Jackson himself was cast as a “gunner” in the film. Hey if it’s your film you can do what you like. Even save a little for the director’s cut if you like.
Oh and again Fay Wray rules! |
