In case there is any confusion regarding the above statement, let me take a moment to explain what I mean.
King Kong is a giant piece of shit.
I was pretty excited to see this movie. I have enjoyed all of Peter Jackson’s films, I think the original movie is quite good (albeit rather dated), and as a friend of mine put it, “No movie with a giant monkey fighting a dinosaur can be bad.”
As it is, there are now three hours and fifteen minutes of my life I will never get back. With the Lord of the Rings films, I was willing to grant Jackson the 3+ hour running times, because it was a huge, epic story he was telling. Kong, on the other hand, is a movie about a twenty foot tall ape who smashes things and likes a girl. That’s a two-hour story, tops. And I think I’m being pretty damn generous with the two hours here.
This film goes on and on, and then it goes on some more. After the first fifteen to twenty minutes, I found myself imagining with each new scene Jackson explaining to some studio executives why this particular part was absolutely necessary to maintain his artistic vision. First there was the highly improbable escape from the stampeding brontosauruses (and mind, you, when I use the word “improbable” here, I’m using it in the context of a story with stampeding brontosauruses). Then there is the Kong-vs.-three-Tyrannasaurus Rexes-while-swinging-from-vines fight scene. Then we get to the assault by all manner of computer-generated but still highly disgusting giant bugs. This scene goes on for at least fifteen minutes. Or maybe it was two minutes—by this point in the movie, I had stopped caring and just wanted it to be over. Sadly, the giant bugs are only about ninety minutes in, not even the halfway point.
Normally, having three hours and fifteen minutes to tell a story would allow one plenty of opportunity to fill in plot holes and make sure the story itself is interesting. The plot holes in this film are too many to detail here, and frankly, they only serve to distract from the fact that story itself is just plain bad. The mysterious fog that has hidden Skull Island for centuries magically vanishes whenever Jackson needs a stunning sunset. The bats in Kong’s cave flap around harmlessly while the gorilla and Our Heroine share a seemingly endless special moment but then suddenly swarm and attack Kong when the principles need to escape. We learn all about a young crewman who is reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, who then turns out to only be in the movie so that that story can be helped along by relevant plot-points in… wait for it… Heart of Darkness.
And then there are the human residents of Skull Island. The only way to excuse the stereotypical racist portrayal of the savage natives who live on the island is to imagine that they have been terrorized for centuries by the unspeakable evil that lurks in the jungle and thereby reduce to this inhuman state. However, Jackson then turns around and asks us to sympathize with this unspeakable evil, namely, Kong, and frankly he just isn’t that terrifying.
What we have here is a story that just isn’t that great to start with, combined with a director who spent the previous seven or eight years making a 10-hour Academy-aware-winning epic. I remember being surprised that as much as I enjoyed the theatrical-release versions of the Lord of the Rings films, the extended editions were even better. Now I find myself wondering if a much-trimmed cut of King Kong might actually be worth sitting through.