Film

“Well, now, that brings a whole new meaning to ape shit.”

Return of the king

The King Kong cinematic machine gets cranking again with Kong: Skull Island, an entertaining enough new take on the big ape that delivers the gorilla action but lags a bit when he isn’t on screen smashing things.

Among Kong incarnations, this one has the most in common with the 1976 take on the classic story, basically because it’s set just a few years earlier in ’73. While there is a beautiful girl the big guy does get a small crush on (Brie Larson as a photographer), the story eschews the usual “beauty and the beast” Kong angle for more straight-up monster vs. monster action. Unlike the past American Kong films, this one never makes it overseas to Manhattan, opting to stay on Kong’s island— thus, the title of the film.

Kong himself is portrayed by motion-capture CGI, and he’s a badass. He’s also tall enough to be a formidable foe for Godzilla, a mash-up already announced for 2020. In the few scenes where he interacts with humans, Kong plays like an organic creature rather than a bunch of gigabytes. He blends well with his human counterparts.

That’s right, there hasn’t been much mention of those human counterparts yet. That’s because, with the exception of John C. Reilly as a fighter pilot stranded on the island during World War II, most of the humans are bland. Tom Hiddleston might make a decent James Bond someday, and he’s a lot of fun as Loki, but he just doesn’t play here as a rugged tracker/action hero. His presence constantly suggests his character might turn bad mid-mission and feed his friends to the monsters or, alternatively, stop for tea and biscuits every five minutes. He’s too much the pretty boy for the role.

Reilly, on the other hand, gives the film the bursts of humor it needs. His castaway is a wild card, like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. Actually, the whole movie, with its post-Vietnam

setup and Nixon-era themes, plays like Apocalypse Now meets King Kong. When Reilly is on screen, it plays like Apocalypse Now meets King Kong meets Talladega Nights. Samuel L. Jackson gets to play the psycho military commander who still holds a beef about the war, while John Goodman is on hand as the explorer who thinks “something” is on this strange, uncharted island. He’s essentially this film’s Carl Denham—one of the main characters from the 1933 original and Peter Jackson’s remake—without being named Carl Denham. The likes of Shea Whigham, Jason Mitchell and Richard Jenkins round out the cast. As for Hiddleston and Larson, one gets the sense their parts were supposed to be bigger, but director Jordan Vogt-Roberts looked at a first cut and realized they sucked, so he replaced a lot of their screen time with Kong action. And Kong gets Kong: Skull plenty of time to destroy things. He battles helicopters, strange dino Island creatures and, in one of the film’s greater moments, a giant octopus 12345 that results in an eating scene that’s a direct homage to Oldboy. How does this Kong stack up Director: Jordan Vogt-Roberts against past Kongs? I’d say it’s the Starring: Tom Hiddleston, weakest of the American Kongs. (I’m Brie Larson a sucker for the ’76 Twin Towers/ Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange one.) Oh wait, it’s better than King Kong Lives, the ’86 sequel to the ’76 Kong where he got the heart transplant. That’s actually one of the worst movies ever made. It’s so bad, I forgot it existed until this paragraph of this very review. Kong: Skull Island is also better than the loopy, strangely enjoyable Japanese Kongs, although it owes much to those films in spirit. As you must do with Marvel films now—with the exception of Logan—stay through Kong: Skull Island credits. There’s an initial sequence during the credits that I won’t give away, and a scene after the credits that I also won’t give away. I’m being stingy with the credit sequence secrets today. Kong: Skull Island is a shallow enterprise, but a fun shallow enterprise at that. It’ll be interesting to see how they bridge the time gap between this excursion and the present day Godzilla. Kong ages well, so they’ll probably just leap over a few decades and get to the good stuff. Ω

4Get Out Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young AfricanAmerican man, is a little nervous. He’s going to visit the parents of Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), his white girlfriend. Rose is relaxed about the trip, but Chris is anxious. His anxiety proves justified shortly into the trip. Upon arrival at her large estate, her parents like Chris. They really, really like Chris. Actually, parents Missy and Dean (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) like Chris at a level that’s a bit unsettling. Chris shrugs it off at first, as does Allison, but strange things start happening. Writer-director Jordan Peele, the comedic performer from TV’s Key&Peele, and the adorable, funny cat movie Keanu, delivers a huge cinematic surprise with GetOut, a twisted, darkly satiric, nasty little horror film that pulls no punches when it comes to race relations and dating. Peele has cited Nightof theLivingDeadand TheStepfordWivesas inspiration for this journey to the dark side of his creative soul. Those films’ influences are detectable, and I’d say you could throw in a pinch of Rosemary’sBabywith a side of Being JohnMalkovichas well. Two of the hardest things to accomplish with a movie are to make people laugh and get them legitimately scared. GetOutmanages to do both for its entire running time.

1The Great Wall Matt Damon stars in this mess, and this may very well represent the low point of his career, a career that has included the atrocious JasonBourneand Hereafter. He probably thought he was in safe hands because TheGreatWallis helmed by director Zang Yimou, maker of such masterpieces as Hero, HouseofFlyingDaggersand—one of my very favorite movies—TheRoadHome. Damon was probably all like, “Hey, Yimou is calling the shots. If anything, I’m going to look good in this pic!” Then … he saw his wardrobe. A wardrobe that begins with big furry wigs and beards, and then declines into a sad man-bun wig as the film progresses. He looks silly from frame one. He sounds silly, too. He’s attempting some sort of accent here, a cross between Irish, Scottish and just plain dickweed. Every time he talks in this movie, it hurts the ears and the soul—especially the souls of those who love Matt Damon. It’s all in the service of a wannabe period epic about non-distinctive, stupidlooking CGI monsters attacking China’s Great Wall, with Damon’s character being the savior with a bow.

4Hidden Figures Katherine Johnson was part of a segregated division at NASA in the ’50s, a wing of mathematicians who did the work that computers do today. HiddenFiguresdepicts the humiliation she and two other historical African-American figures, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, went through while solving equations that helped put men safely into space. Taraji P. Henson plays Johnson, the “smart one” astronaut John Glenn personally demanded check the coordinates before his historical flight launched. Octavia Spencer is her usual great self as Vaughan, doing the work of a supervisor without the title and curious about that new IBM thing they just installed down the hall. Vaughan would become crucial to the implementation of computers at NASA, as well as being the agency’s first AfricanAmerican supervisor. As Jackson, NASA’s first female African-American aeronautical engineer. Singer Janelle Monae is so good, it’s easy to forget that this is just her second movie role. As a composite, fictional character named Al Harrison, Kevin Costner does some of his best acting in years.

5La La Land This is an all new, original musical from director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) that’s surprisingly low on melodrama while full of vibrancy, beautiful tunes, outstanding set pieces and a stunning sense of realism for a movie where the characters bust out singing. It’s the best original movie musical ever made. The story follows wannabe actress Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz composer Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they try to make it in crazy Los Angeles. They don’t like each other much at first, but then they fall in love, which provides Chazelle and his performers ample opportunities for musical numbers that surprise at every turn. This solidifies Gosling as one of the best actors of his generation. Stone doesn’t just make her mark with a beautiful voice and expert footwork—she embodies the character trying to “make it” in the business.

4The Lego Batman Movie This is the great Batman story that BatmanvSupermanfailed to be. Even better, it has Will Arnett voicing Batman with a new, super amped, still dark, but amazingly well rounded and sometimes humorous incarnation. After all these years of dark—and admittedly sometimes brilliant—Batman movies, it’s nice to have a vehicle where we can just have fun with the character. Director Chris McKay, along with a long list of writers, has come up with a story that will please adult Batman fans as much as the kids who will most assuredly be dropped off at the local Cineplex to watch a movie while parents catch a break from the little mayhem makers. Arnett’s Batman not only faces off against the Joker (a very funny Zach Galifianakis), but finds himself in a scenario where he’s battling a smorgasbord of movie villains including King Kong, the Gremlins, Dracula, evil British robots and Voldemort (Eddie Izzard), to name just a few. It’s a nutty plot element that also allows for Batman mainstays like Bane, Two-Face (Billy Dee Williams, who was Harvey Dent in Tim Burton’s Batman) and the Riddler (Conan O’Brien!) to get in on the act. It’s a geek fest, a movie lover’s delight that has a funny little trivia bit at nearly every turn and an emotional center.

5Logan Hugh Jackman—allegedly—says goodbye to Wolverine with Logan, a total shocker of a superhero movie that lays waste to the X-Menand standalone Wolverinemovies that came before it. Director James Mangold, who piloted the decent TheWolverine, revamps the character’s mythos, and pulls along Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) for the gritty, bloody, nasty, awesome ride. It’s the future, and the X-Men are gone. A mutant hasn’t been born in a quarter of a century, and Logan isn’t looking too hot. He’s driving a limo to make ends meet, coughing up blood, and basically not aging well. He’s doing a lot better than Xavier, the mutant formally known as Professor X, who’s prone to seizures and suffering from some sort of degenerative brain disease. In short, the days of X-Men glory are way, way over, with Logan and Xavier having a shit time in their autumn years. Just when it seems as if the pair will waste away in their miserable existence, along comes Laura (a dynamite Dafne Keen). She’s a genetically engineered mutant equipped with the same retractable claws and viciously bad temper as Logan. When her life becomes endangered, Logan throws her and Xavier in the back of his vehicle, and they are off on one wild, dark road trip. To say this movie is violent would be an understatement.

4Split Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has finally made his first good movie since Signs(2002) with Split, a down-to-thebasics, creepy thriller propelled by excellent performances from James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy (TheWitch). The film reminds us that Shyamalan can be a capable director and writer when he’s not getting too carried away. Taylor-Joy plays Casey, a high school outcast who attends a birthday party but soon finds herself and two classmates imprisoned by a strange man with multiple personalities (McAvoy). In addition to the angry man who kidnaps them, he’s also a stately, mannered woman, a 9-year-old child and, well, a few others. One of those other personalities plays a big part in taking the film into other realms beyond psychological thriller. McAvoy goes nuts with the role, and Shyamalan takes things into supernatural territories in a chilling climax.