Now Playing: KING KONG (2005)
The best thing I can say about KING KONG is that there's a really good two-hour movie in there.
* Did we really need two scenes where Ann entertains Kong with her vaudeville routine? The second one where she juggles is wonderful, but its impact is slighter than it should have been, since we have already seen her do this.
* Did we really need two scenes where Englehorn comes out of nowhere (and unbelievably quickly too, judging from the timeline) to save the cast? Smells like lazy writing.
* If Jackson wanted to make a movie about Jimmy the Stowaway and His Dignified Black Friend Hayes, I wish he had so I could have elected to not see it. I have no idea why these characters got so much screen time. They added nothing emotionally or narratively that I noticed.
* Will directors please learn that slow motion is not scary nor does it build suspense? The only scene worse than a minute-and-a-half of Naomi Watts looking at chloroform bottles in slow motion is Adrien Brody's typewriter spelling S-K-U-L-L-I-S-L-A-N-D one letter at a time.
* Jimmy fires a machine gun point-blank at Driscoll...and amazingly only hits the small creatures crawling on him!
* Ann Darrow should be a stuntwoman, not an actress. Not only can she easily fall hundreds of feet, bouncing off walls and vines on the way down, without even getting one scratch on her (or a smudge of mud), she doesn't even suffer whiplash from being tossed and whipped around at high speeds. Heck, she can even stand on top of the Empire State Building in the dead of winter without getting cold or being blown off.
* Peter Jackson obviously never learned that Less Is More. Kong fights a pterodactyl in the 1933 movie, so he has to fight 20 million giant bats in this one.
* Argh, the pacing was so off. It isn't so much that entire scenes needed to be snipped out (although some do--ice skating sequence, I'm talking to you), but several shots and scenes go on forever. Was it necessary for the final goodbye between Kong and Ann to take three or four minutes? Does it really take more than 25 seconds for us to get The Point that She Feels Sympathy For The Big Brute?
* The original filmmakers shot a spider pit sequence too, but they removed it because it stopped the story. That doesn't stop Peter Jackson, to whom story and pacing take a backseat to his own ego. His spider pit scene also halts the film's momentum, although it certainly isn't the only one.
As I said, there's a good movie trapped beneath all the fat. Naomi Watts is terrific. No question that if a giant monkey was to fall in love with a human female, she would be Naomi Watts. The rest of the cast was fine as well. I even thought Jack Black was okay, although it was a mistake for Jackson to make him such an unrepentant asshole and then not punish him for it. Robert Armstrong survived the '33 KONG, but his huckster was likable in a way that Black is not. Charles Grodin played Denham as a jackass and got squashed to audience applause.
Most of the visual effects are excellent. I'm not a CGI enthusiast, but the matte renderings of New York City were wonderful, and I have nothing but praise for the exciting biplane climax.
The music is drab, not that you can hear beneath all the caterwauling and sound effects. Considering James Newton Howard's score was a late replacement for Howard Shore's, I wonder how "bad" Shore's must have been. I have a hunch it's actually better.
Those who watch the closing crawl will discover a sweet acknowledgement of Merian Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, Willis O'Brien, Robert Armstrong and "the incomparable Fay Wray"'s inspiration.
Jackson deserves his props for putting the Wilhelm Scream in his movie. Did you hear it?
Posted by Marty
at 7:13 PM CST
Updated: Tuesday, January 3, 2006 7:21 PM CST
