Kong: Skull Island is on course for a $52 million opening weekend. It’s far from being a monster smash and the knuckle-chewingly dull picture is an example of just about everything that’s wrong with the modern blockbuster.
It also encapsulates the alarming lack of quality control at Warner Bros. after the debacle of Batman Vs Superman and Suicide Squad: spectacle at the expense of story, forgettable characters and the unimaginative use of a much-loved property. Kong: Skull Island‘s big idea is to pitch Kong against a variety of other creatures on an island where he is not, in fact, king, or at least where there are contenders for his crown in the form of dinosaur-like ‘Skullcrawlers’.
Yes folks, those brilliant minds on the Warners Bros lot came up with, drum roll please….King Kong meets Jurassic Park. Take one mysterious island in the Pacific, helicopter in a large number of hapless humans and pit them against an oversized ape and a range of unpleasant creatures, including giant spiders (gosh, never seen those before).
Far from being a Spielbergian treat (some critics have name-checked the director in their weirdly favorable reviews) the picture is a suspense-free spectacle which commits the cardinal sin of revealing the monster far too early, something Spielberg would never do (remember Jaws, anyone?).
Almost immediately on arriving at the island, the team of scientists under military escort, led by Samuel L Jackson’s shouty Lt Col Preston Packard, are confronted by Kong in all his hairy majesty. The towering ape swats their helicopters out of the sky like pesky hornets.
This is all good fun – for five minutes. The problem is the second act has only just started and there is a numbing 100 minutes to go. There’s no plot and the screenplay (credited to four writers) can’t even settle on who exactly the hero is.
Is it Jackson’s mad-as-hell army guy, Tom Hiddleston’s ex-British special forces “tracker”? Or John Goodman’s monster-theorist who has persuaded the US government to sanction the expedition? Or is it John C. Reilly’s crackers US airman, stranded on the island since World War 2. Perhaps he is the hero? You tell me.
Instead of a story we just get distractions. Of these John C. Reilly’s US airman is the most entertaining character, playing it for laughs while a grave Hiddleston appears to be gunning for a BAFTA.
The pity is that, for the first 20 minutes, the picture shows real promise and originality before the studio committee got to work and reduced it to a series of meaningless monster set-pieces.
Set in 1974 as America is extricating itself from the Vietnam War, the backdrop is ripe for pertinent metaphor. America is bruised after its efforts to tame the jungles of South East Asia have failed humiliatingly. “We didn’t lose the war, we abandoned it” shouts Jackson.
Might Skull Island offer some redemption, or merely further evidence of man’s heart of darkness, Joseph Conrad-style? Apocalypse Now is heavily referenced, alongside other ‘Nam movies.
The potential was there for a slyly clever blockbuster with something to say about the world, much like the reborn Planet Of The Apes franchise; this summer’s War For The Planet Of The Apes looks set to be a reminder of how it’s done.
Interestingly, Warner has hired that film’s Matt Reeves, who also made 2014’s Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, to direct the upcoming The Batman, replacing Ben Affleck who was to have helmed the movie.
It’s a sign the studio may finally be twigging that ‘blockbuster’ shouldn’t necessarily equal ‘brain dead’, a lesson Disney-owned Marvel Comics learned years ago.
Pity this message never reached Skull Island.
