Warner Bros. made the big monster fight the big ape and spent $200 million doing it, so the brawl better be good. We’ve been surrounded by the smallness of our houses and feeble bodies for over a year now—we want big, we want huge, we want to cheer our brains out as a gorilla uses a skyscraper to block a nuclear tail or something. Seeing these two titans together for the first time in 60 years might be all it takes to satisfy diehard kaiju fans, but the rest of us need to be won over by their fight, like bored children enjoying the theatrics of their enraged, super jacked parents.
The previous movies in the MonsterVerse are, when stacked together, about as exciting as a divorce proceeding. When you get down to it, the fatal flaw of the 2014 Godzilla reboot was that its human characters just weren’t interesting, and spending time with them while we waited for the kaiju to appear was a bore. Sequel King of the Monsters upped the kaiju count but doubled down on the flavorless humans too. Only Kong: Skull Island, with its lighter screwball touch, resembled the kind of fun we go to monster movies for.
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So Godzilla vs. Kong has some lessons to learn from, but it quickly becomes apparent that screenwriters are more resistant to learning than actual gorillas are—why else would there be, in the year of our lord 2021, a joke about kids eating Tide Pods? Is this a movie about two behemoths duking it out or a low-grade SNL skit? Yes, monster movies are supposed to be dumb, but they should be a specific kind of dumb, and that distinction has been lost almost entirely on this franchise. There are glimpses into what could’ve been: when Kong finds a magical axe that plugs into the center of the earth and charges like a battery, that’s good dumb, a silly promise that a monkey will be lightsabering through monsters before our very eyes. But Godzilla vs. Kong is mostly bad dumb—the kind of dumb you can only achieve by failing to be smart.
Though it doesn’t take itself as seriously as King of the Monsters (which had eco-terrorists freeing kaiju to stop manmade climate change, I think, or some equally preposterous attempt at “serious themes”), Godzilla vs. Kong still gets bogged down in its desperation for a weighty, expansive story, especially because it’s saddled with concluding the four-movie arc that began with 2014’s Godzilla. At best, a monster movie is confident in its ridiculousness, but Godzilla vs. Kong feels ashamed of itself, explaining the fun stuff away with sci-fi jargon and trying its darndest to convince us how such a fight could feasibly come to be. But its grasp at grounding the story only reveals how deficient its reach is. You want to know a good way to avoid plot holes? Don’t string together an arbitrarily elaborate plot. Godzilla and Kong fight because this town’s not big enough for the two of them: boom, airtight. Now you don’t have to worry about inconsistencies like the world’s most intelligent minds failing to put two and two together (a common refrain in vs. Kong). Godzilla only attacks when provoked and it attacked a mysterious corporation for some reason? Whatever could be going on?
In the surprisingly rare moments that Godzilla and Kong get to fighting, director Adam Wingard brings a sense of clarity and spatial consistency that was missing from King of the Monsters, which had a habit of hiding its subpar kaiju battles behind weather effects. Wingard likes to give us a monster’s-eye-view of the carnage, like we’re watching footage from a giant camera strapped to the head of a kaiju cinematographer. The scale can be impressive. But the fight choreography—or whatever the visual effects version of that is—disappoints. It’s the (expensive) equivalent of bouncing action figures off of each other and into glass houses, paying only sparing attention to the monsters’ contrasting strengths and weaknesses (Kong swinging around buildings is as imaginative as the film gets with the fighting style of an enormous ape.) The sound design even lacks the satisfying crunch of destruction that rubble auteur Zack Snyder is sure to include. Wingard’s penchant for bright colors and neon lighting is the only thing that gives the action personality.
If Godzilla vs. Kong has anything over King of the Monsters, it’s those little peeks at personality. Alexander Skarsgârd and Rebecca Hall emote way more than the script is asking of them—a first for this franchise’s protagonists—and the cast is generally strong all around, up to and including Kong himself. The movie’s biggest strength is the pathos that the VFX team wrings out of his expressive face. You’ll believe this ape can really feel—can’t say the same for the screenwriters, though.
★½ (1.5/5)
