GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE begins with a lonely Kong suffering the pain of an infected tooth, and the loneliness of being the last of his kind. It’s a good place to start, and if the filmmakers had stayed with the big guy on his adventures, this would have been a much better flick. Instead, they expanded the action to include the humans from the last film in this franchise (NEVER to be confused with the infinitely superior GODZILLA MINUS ONE franchise), and things went downhill from there.
Not that some of the humans aren’t fun. Certainly, Dan Stevens as Trapper, the holistic hippie veterinarian in a Hawaiian shirt is a delight with his chewy Aussie twang and sense of fair play among all living things, even mosquitos. Even better is Brian Tyree Henry as Bernie, the conspiracist podcaster with a gift for gab who talks himself into unfortunate situations with comic panache. Again, if they’d left it at these characters, we would still have had a popcorn flick with some well-earned guffaws and belly-laughs amid those primo special effects.
Alas, the star of the piece is an all too solemn Rebecca Hall, hog-tied into a role as Dr. Ilene Andrews that allows her little more than a flicker of irony and far too much treacle. This is especially bad when dealing with Dr. Andrew’s adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle). the last of the Iwi people of Kong’s home, Skull Island. That she is also in middle school with all the attendant moodiness does not help, though when a girl has gone from protector of Kong to Algebra I, who can blame her for being a little down in the dumps? Particularly when subjected to psychic visions of a disturbing, inchoate nature.
Getting back to Kong, he’s now living in the Hollow World, safe from annoying Godzilla, who is topside protecting the world from kaiju, like the immense spidery arthropod terrorizing Rome. But something weird is afoot, with electrical anomalies that set off Bernie’s conspiracy alarm, and Godzilla making a beeline for a nuclear power plant in France to recharge big time. But that’s not all, Kong and his magic hatchet have tumbled into the uncharted part of the Hollow Earth, and while he discovers more of his kind, it isn’t the love fest he might have hoped it would be.
It all gets very silly very fast with a plot whose main function is to get the humans from point A to point B, and to do so without taking away any more time than necessary from the action-packed effects sequences. Did I mention they are great? And not just the action-packed ones where Rio is flattened. There’s also the sight of Godzilla curling up like a kitten in the Colosseum after a long day of kaiju fighting, and Trapper yanking Kong’s incisor. The best effects are in the service of an army of primates animated to such a fine degree that they have more shades of characterization than the poor humans are allowed. There are good monkeys and bad monkeys that carry scenes without dialogue, and a duplicitous baby one (still the same height as a mid-size skyscraper) with an expressive face and superb body language that will warm your heart and make you want to toss it into a handy lava pit. The relationship it strikes up with Kong is startlingly complex and easily the most compelling in the story. Forget Dr. Andrews and Jia, this is the parent-child relationship worth following, and about which you might even want to take a few notes. You can do that while the convoluted and contrived plot in which the humans are enmeshed takes place.
GODZILLA X KONG is an example of where kaiju films go wrong. If the plot is silly, at least make it lively and internally logical. And now the inevitable comparison to GODZILLA MINUS ONE. Where Takashi Yamazaki made the kaiju a metaphor that was arch and moving, thereby raising the emotional stakes as Tokyo crumbles, for GODZILLA X KONG, that mayhem is the point, and the story just so much filling (made with artificial color and flavorings) to hold it together. When there is another sequel in this franchise, and heaven help us there will be, please, I beg you, spin off vet and the podcaster and let them romp merrily amid the kaiju.
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