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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 46.49%
Worth A Look: 20.4%
Average: 10.7%
Pretty Bad: 13.04%
Total Crap: 9.36%
16 reviews, 203 user ratings
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| King Kong (2005) |
by Lybarger
"How do you like your monkey?"
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While director Peter Jackson’s gargantuan remake of the 1933 classic features enough monsters, stunts and technical wizardry for about 14 movies, the greatest charm of the new "King Kong" comes when Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) bonds with her 20-foot primate boyfriend.Melding actor Andy Serkis’ performance (he also played the digitally rendered Gollum in Jackson’s "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy) with a computer-generated gorilla, the new Kong demonstrates a range of emotions that makes you love the overgrown ape. When people attack this Kong, you may find yourself siding against your own species.
One of the most striking aspects of Jackson’s new take on the most famous monkey tale ever told is how closely he follows the spirit and outline of the original flick. There are no attempts to make light of the previous movie or to make the story edgier for a modern crowd. Jackson and co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens even retain the 1930s setting and even play it up.
Instead of being a mere sailor, Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) is WPA playwright and screenwriter who’s at the mercy of shady filmmaker named Carl Denham (an appropriately skuzzy and even Faustian Jack Black). Considering Denham’s amusingly loose definition of ethics ("You can trust me, I’m a movie producer."), Jack might have been wise to stay unemployed.
Denham wants to film an adventure movie on a remote, uncharted location in the Indian Ocean called Skull Island. On the run from both the law and his skeptical studio, Denham is making up the project as he goes. He’s even literally picked up his leading lady (Watts) off the street.
If the journey weren’t perilous enough, the island itself is populated with hostile natives, dinosaurs, and a two-story gorilla named Kong, who’s got an understandable attraction to Ann.
There’s really no way that Jackson and his crew can reproduce the enormous impact of the 1933 movie. Merian C. Cooper’s film chief virtue was its innovation (there hadn’t been all that many movies featuring stop motion animated gorillas tearing up New York landmarks). Not having that advantage, Jackson goes for overkill.
The results are often spectacular. Jack Driscoll and the rest of the crew have to dodge their way through a rampaging herd of charging dinosaurs. And Kong has to take on more than just one T-Rex looking to make a meal of Ann.
Jackson and his collaborators are even able to stage some sequences that Merian C. Cooper and his animation guru Willis O’Brien had to abandon for technical or pacing reasons. Die hard Kong fans can finally see the giant bug attacks that have until this point only been the stuff of legend. We may have to wait through an hour of exposition to get to this stuff, but Jackson consistently rewards the patient.
While the technical marvels on display are to be expected, the film would probably have collapsed with a lesser actress than Watts (even Jessica Lange would be happy if you forgot her in the 1976 version). Without her convincing interactions, the bonding scenes between beauty and mutant gorilla wouldn’t have been nearly as charming.
As with the original, there’s a plenty of fodder for nitpickers. For example, why does Denham use a hand-cranked camera when the movie is set in the era of sound movies? Or why do Denham and his team choose to capture Kong when the dinosaurs might make a more impressive haul back to New York City?
Nonetheless, Jackson never loses sight of the adventurousness of the original and chooses to match it rather than mock it. Maybe that’s why this "Kong" works in a way the 1976 version didn’t. Jackson thankfully knows better than to tinker with a story that already works.Yes, that 1976 "man in a monkey suit" version of Kong may have impressed me as a nine-year-old, but I think I'll still be impressed with this one should I live to be ninety.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13654&reviewer=382
originally posted: 12/21/05 16:13:16
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USA
14-Dec-2005 (PG-13)
DVD: 14-Nov-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
14-Dec-2005
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