Movie Review – Kong: Skull Island

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts makes a monkey out of the doubters, going gonzo with his King Kong reboot Skull Island.

You can remake it. You can reboot it. You can reimagine it. Just don’t ruin it.

That’s the maxim upon which Hollywood leans in 2017, which will see retakes based on intellectual properties of varied esteem: Beauty and the Beast. Blade Runner. Alien. Spider-Man. The Mummy. CHiPs. Power Rangers. Baywatch. (Yes, these titles were listed in descending order.)

The only tried and tested film property seemingly not getting another guernsey in 2017 is the Ocean’s Eleven franchise. That’s coming in 2018 instead.

Perhaps we’ll look back on Kong: Skull Island, a reinterpretation of the King Kong tale, as the best of this year’s batch. That’s a testament to its refreshing, unconventional oddness, and a modest setting of the bar. Gang, we only need to clear “pretty good” for 2017 to be a banner year!

Helmed by indie filmmaker Jordan Vogt-Roberts and credited to writers Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly, Kong: Skull Island updates the setting of the 1933 original (and Peter Jackson’s 2005 retread) by taking place in 1973.

With America’s involvement in the Vietnam War coming to an end, a platoon led by Lieutenant Colonel Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) is summoned for one final mission: babysit a team of scientists, led by conspiracy theorist Bill Randa (John Goodman), on a trip to the recently-discovered Skull Island nearby. (Actually, it’s more of an archipelago. A skull archipelago.) They bring with them Tom Hiddleston's former SAS captain and current tracker-for-hire James Conrad (a nod to author Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness inspired Apocalypse Now) and war photojournalist Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), both looking for a final adventurous fling before shipping out.

Well, they get it. Upon arrival, a giant ape greets their fleet of helicopters, interrupting Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” blaring from their speakers. The soldiers and their flying machines are easy fodder, and the survivors, scrambled across the island (archipelago), soon learn that this beast, called Kong by the locals, is technically on the humans’ side, protecting them from even gnarlier monsters.

So, there you have it. Conrad and Weaver, joined by previously downed—and mildly deranged—WW2 pilot Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly), lead a team to a proposed rescue point, while the vengeful Packard, replacing the Viet Cong for King Kong, finds himself in a ground battle for which he’s ill-equipped, interrupting a long-standing feud he doesn’t fully understand. Politics!

Low-hanging political commentary-fruit aside, Kong: Skull Island isn’t a self-serious colonial exercise like 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan. It has a weird energy and darkly-comic sense of humour (surely lifted from Vogt-Roberts’ time spent on the bittersweet TV show You’re the Worst).

Some might be thrown by Skull Island's offbeat tonal shifts. I didn’t mind being kept on my toes. It was the swashbuckling heroism of Hiddleston and his googly-eyed, almost-romance with Larson that felt like the interloping element. A shame, as the two of them are exceptionally funny performers. However, they cede the floor to character actors Reilly, Jackson, Goodman and Shea Whigham, among others, who are expert at walking this strange, comic line in other, smaller films. Now, they anchor a blockbuster. Really, it should have been called ‘That Guy’ Island.

And ‘guy’ is right. There are as many female cast members in Kong: Skull Island as there are actors who have portrayed members of N.W.A.: two. (Tip of the hat to The Great Wall’s Jing Tian, playing a mousy scientist, and Straight Outta Compton’s Corey Hawkins and Jason Mitchell, another mousy scientist and a soldier, respectively.)

Kong: Skull Island fails the ‘Bechdel Test’. It even fails the ‘Bubbles Test’, which is a test I just made up. (To pass, a movie must feature at least two apes who talk to one another about something other than bananas.)

But it has big explosions, a booming score by Henry Jackman, Purple Haze-infused cinematography by Larry Fong, and plenty of measly humans getting picked off by apex predators the size of skyscrapers. Kong: Skull Island doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It just rides it. And it’s a lot of fun.

I’m looking forward to the '80s-set sequels. Give that ape some leg warmers.

3.5/5

In cinemas March 9, 2017. Rated M for sustained threat, action violence and coarse language.

Photo: Warner Bros