Starring Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson

Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts

Legendary, out now

Legendary add King Kong to their monsterverse in a very ordinary, old-school movie that boasts some great effects but dreadfully wastes its talented cast.

It’s 1973, three years before the much-mocked and then-contemporary Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange version, and new satellite technology has revealed a ‘mysterious island’ shrouded in its own extreme weather system that prevents ships or planes from leaving. And so John Goodman leads an expedition to this ‘lost world’, and before you can say Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs, we’re in some very familiar Bank Holiday TV fare as the star cast fight various giant CGI meanies and try to escape.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts clearly likes his Vietnam war movies and as such we get lots of shots of helicopter rotor blades in slo-mo, flying in silhouette in front of a blazing sun, and other Apocalypse Now call-backs, including Samuel L Jackson’s platoon leader who goes the way of Colonel Kurtz very quickly. Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson are respectively expert trapper and war photographer but neither can bring their roles alive, each having to deliver exposition dumps to define their characters. The other cast members are equally ill-defined, eliciting little sympathy when they are inevitably eaten, beaten or impaled by the island’s indigenous fauna.

Kong, however, is magnificent. He is beautifully rendered and Terry Notary’s mo-cap performance perfectly captures the majesty and rage of this king among the beasts. The set-pieces too are very good, with Kong swatting helicopters out of the sky, ripping apart a squid (throwing calamari chunks at the screen for the 3D crowd) and facing off against lizardy salamander beasts with Lovecraftian proboscises.

This is Kong’s second big screen appearance in as many months, having previously bolstered the ranks of the villains in The LEGO Batman Movie. But this is a bigger Kong than you’re used to, being at least four times the size of previous incarnations. He’s still growing too, and maybe the intervening years between 1973 and 2020’s Godzilla vs Kong will give him a chance to catch up in height with the atomic lizard. Don’t worry though, they’ll probably realise that both their moms are called Martha and call the whole thing off!

Understandably, the natives are no longer cannibalistic savages with little interest in sacrificing girls to their god, and neither is Brie Larson a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued. But these modern sensibilities aside, this is very old-fashioned storytelling. Oh, and sure to hang around for an extra scene at the end of some very long credits which sets up the next film in the series.

In the 1933 original, Robert Armstrong says: “It was beauty killed the beast” and it will be interesting to see if Disney’s Beauty and the Beast kills this beast at the box office next week.

Verdict: Not a bad film by any stretch, but it shamefully squanders it’s A-list cast. With a plot that wouldn’t trouble the average six-year-old, the simplicity of the narrative (hide, run, fight, repeat) is at odds with the technological brilliance of the animation and impressive set design. A monster mash that should impress the Jurassic World crowd, Legendary need to work on their scripts if they want this franchise to shine. 6/10

Nick Joy