King Kong

Rating PG-13 Genre action Starring Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis, Thomas Kretschmann Directed by Peter Jackson Publisher Universal Pictures External Links Official Site

There are stories that demand three or more hours of film to tell them. Lord of the Rings was one of them, but King Kong isn't. Peter Jackson could have and should have lost at least thirty minutes from his monkey opus. He didn't - be ready to forgive him. Is this a movie good enough to overcome its excessive, 187 minute length? Oh hell yes.

Directed and co-written by Jackson, Kong uses a combination of models, sets, computer animation, and Andy Serkis in a motion-capture unitard to return to theaters the giant ape character made famous back in 1933. Since his debut in the first Kong, the giant ape character has been redone ad nauseam, both in official sequels and not-so-official ones like Mighty Joe Young. None of them have approached the greatness of this. Perhaps not even the original.

The basics of the story remain much the same. An obsessively self-promoting filmmaker named Carl Denham (Jack Black) loads a film crew and a hapless young actress named Anne Darrow (Naomi Watts) onto a boat to set out for a mysterious place known only as Skull Island. There, they find more at their shooting location than they bargained for. The natives kidnap their leading lady and sacrifice her to their local god... a 25ft tall ape named Kong. But Kong doesn't do with Anne what he usually does with his other victims. Her blonde hair hypnotizes him, her beauty beguiles him, and so he leaves her limbs intact. This monkey's in love.

The essentials remain spot on faithful to the original movie Jackson is remaking, but in between those he's made this pic his own. Now more than a sympathetic monster movie, Kong has become a deeply emotional, sometimes tortured film. Thematically, this is a story not about fighting gargantuan monsters, but about loneliness. Naomi Watts is a big part of that deeper story; she plays off Kong like the big furball is actually standing there. Anne Darrow identifies with his tragedy, and we see him through her eyes.

This has the unexpected effect of making it possible to absolutely love Kong, even while he's biting the head off one of the movie's human hero characters. King Kong's not pulling any punches, and the film is almost surprisingly brutal in the way characters are smashed, shaken, shot, and in many cases eaten. Again, Jackson has taken that 1933 source material and put his stamp on it. His affinity for the macabre is all over the movie, in a way that's been absent in past incarnations. As a result, the pic is in places flat out scary, the kind of scary you don't usually get outside of Freddie Krueger. Take a date and wait for her to crush your arm during the movie's gleefully gruesome bug attack.

If there's any place where Kong misses, it's only because Peter's reach has extended beyond his grasp. The movie is consistently plagued by flesh and blood, live actors who don't mesh properly into the beautifully constructed CGI action. You're left you with a movie full of actors that look like they're running in front of a screen while a lot of wild hoopla goes on behind them, which in fact they are.

Those special effects criticisms are small potatoes in the face of a feature film this masterfully created. It's too involving and full of little delights to be dragged down by effects work. This is the kind of movie that'd be nearly as good were it still using those primitive stop-motion techniques put to work on the 1933 version. It's clear from what's up on screen that the people making it love this material, and because of that Kong succeeds.