‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ Review: A mental mush of a monster mash
2 min read . Updated: 02 Apr 2021, 10:44 AM IST - King Kong’s relationship with a deaf orphan played by newcomer Kaylee Hottle offers some tenderness between CGI battle sequences.
It’s hard to believe that human minds conceived the story line of “Godzilla vs. Kong"—not because it’s so intricate, elegant or spiritually elevated, but because it’s so incoherent and idiotic. (The film is playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.)
Apart from the battles, which are computer-generated and sometimes quite beautiful—though sometimes not—the film functions as a gibberish generator. People spew fragmentary techie phrases. (“A psionic interface!") They commit ritual hyperbole. (“This is a power beyond our understanding!") They discuss matters that have nothing to do with anything but filling time. (“Water. They put fluoride in it. Learned it from the Nazis. Theory is it makes you docile. Easy to manipulate.") The sole exception to this scattershot logorrhea is Jia, a graceful young orphan with a special connection to Kong. She is deaf, and played with lovely subtlety by a deaf actress, Kaylee Hottle, making her feature debut. Since Jia signs, she’s the only one whose presence isn’t diminished by dreadful spoken dialogue that’s supposed to be funny but falls infallibly flat.
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2 min read . 07:30 AM ISTIn a patchwork production full of bad ideas poorly executed, Jia also embodies the story’s only good idea. (Adam Wingard directed from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein.) Kong has always had a soft spot for human females. In this case the appeal is instantly clear. A native of Skull Island, where the action resumes many years after the ragtag events of the 2017 film “Kong: Skull Island," Jia was orphaned by a storm that wiped out the island’s indigenous population. She needs Kong’s protection, and gives him a gift in return—her sign language, which he picks up spontaneously, with no urging on her part. What a promising development that is, and how stirring the consequences might have been, plumbing the depths of Kong’s psyche in the simian equivalent of “Garbo Speaks!" But it, too, comes to almost nothing, just some rudimentary exchanges that give way to the big guy’s usual bellows and grunts.
There be other monsters as well—not only Godzilla, once the spawn of atomic bombs and now a slithery cipher who undergoes what would be a personality change if he had a personality, but Mechagodzilla, a revenant from Japanese epics whose high-voltage predations may put you in mind of the worst “Transformers" film you’ve ever seen. All three duke it out in a Hong Kong climax that looks, for all its digital wizardry, like a World Wrestling Entertainment show. Oh, for the magical days of men in rubber gorilla suits.
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.
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