King Kong

Of the big three blockbusters leading up to Christmas (Potter, Narnia & Kong) I was perhaps least excited by this one. Don't ask me why - it was clearly going to be aimed at a more adult audience, had the best director by a monster margin and a cast to die screaming in the jungle for! Maybe I was worried it just wouldn't work and we'd have another Godzilla on our hands? Maybe I sensed the casting of Jack Black as the lead and Adrien Brody as the male love interest just wouldn't work, despite their fine work in other genres? Maybe the thought of a 30 foot CGI monkey just left me cold? I don't know - but I really needn't have fretted. So my initial reaction was that it was much too long, indulgent even, but it had been a long day and a misjudged double bill with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe had left me a little drained. Put it this way, what worked really worked, and there was plenty to admire. Filmed in three distinct sections, the journey to the island, full of build and anticipation, Kong's discovery and capture, full of thrills , shocks and scares, and back in New York, the pay-off leading to the extraordinary Empire state recreation, it is an immediately unsettling movie that manipulates the audience well. The superior middle section out-climaxes the climax however, leaving you a little numb by the closing credits that have seemed a long way off for the last hour. Black and Brody were better than expected, especially Jack, who I imagine will get a lot more offers of serious roles after this. Equally, Naomi Watts lived up to the part with adequate flair and was on the whole an enjoyable and sympathetic heroine. But top honours have to go, yet again, to a largely uncredited Andy Sirkis, who not only broke more new ground with his CG enhanced performance as Kong, but offered a marvelously comic turn as the ships cook - a character that suffers one of the best deaths in cinema history (not a person in the house that wasn't cringing!) and is gifted with the movies best line too (the one about the footprint and the Abominable Snowman). More to like than not then, and I look forward to seeing it again when a bit less jaded. It's great that new epics can still be created and embraced with the positive reactions that this got across the board generally. Just a shame it couldn't have been a bit tighter and brave enough to ditch the dead end subplots. Oscar deemed it worthy of only four technical nominations recently and I have to say that that's about right. 8/10 Kx