Bigger isn’t always better
King Kong is epic but lacks character development
Cory Anderson Volunteer Staff
Kong is a gohrilla of epic proportions, and hailed Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson is well-suited to make a three-hour film that’s just as large.
Set in the ‘30s, King Kong is about a gorgeous blonde named Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), who follows a down-on-his luck filmmaker, Carl Denham (Jack Black), to star in his next movie. They quickly board a ship that’s setting sail to the film’s location: the greatly feared Skull Island. Once on board, Ann becomes star-struck upon meeting the renowned playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), but not before mistaking him for someone else. With the intent to apologize, she follows him to his room, where they share one of the most contrived and drawn-out scenes of intense staring ever seen in cinema. Suddenly, the two have a star-crossed romance unseen since James Cameron’s Titanic.
Once shipwrecked on the mysterious island, the mighty Kong suddenly appears in order to take Ann into the jungle to become his girlfriend. They are followed by a brigade lead by Driscoll, who is apparently madly in love, and are willing to sacrifice their lives to rescue her. After Carl provokes the island’s dinosaurs (who have inexplicably survived 65 million years here but no where else on earth) with his camera, the humans run through the legs of several brontosauruses and a pack of velociraptors in a CGI-driven sequence that falls severely short of Jurassic Park’s accomplishments.
Now you won’t believe this even if you see it, but all of the brontosauruses trip and tumble over each other repeatedly, squashing the velociraptors and leaving the human characters unharmed.
Meanwhile, frightened by Kong’s grizzly appearance, Ann escapes into the jungle, only to become surrounded by more than one Tyrannosaurus rex.
In another completely contrived sequence, the giant gorilla that also apparently can’t live without Ann arrives to wrestle the dinosaurs, which means swinging them around by their tails and smacking them up against trees. Alas, the ape has proven to the beautiful Ann that he is stalwart and brave, and it becomes apparent that we have a $207 million version of Beauty and the Beast. For the next hour, Driscoll and the ship’s crew battle every kind of gigantic insect known and unknown to man, while Kong continues to save Ann from other creatures. Eventually, Carl decides to take the gorilla back to America for display on Broadway, using Ann as bait to obtain the beast, although it is baffling how the humans moved a massive and unconscious Kong onto a shipwrecked boat for transport.
Although Carl, Jack and Ann are gravely lacking character development, Jackson strikes gold with the inter-species romance between Kong and Ann, which is somehow very sweet and even touching. The two share intimate moments on an ice pond, where the monkey embraces her while experiencing skating for the first time, but somehow the ice beneath the behemoth does not even crack. Jackson evokes emotion from the audience during the climax, between Ann and Kong atop the Empire State building. However, it includes, incomprehensibly, a moment where Jack returns and Ann kisses him passionately. Did Jackson not spend the last three hours convincing us that she loves the ape? And by ape, I mean Kong, not Adrien Brody. King Kong could have been exceptional if Jackson had actually told his editor to cut out the second hour, focusing more on emotion and character, and less on dinosaurs and giant bugs.
King Kong
Directed by Peter Jackson
Now playing
3 out of five
