King Kong
Studio: Universal Pictures
Rated: PG-13
Website: http://www.kingkongmovie.com/
Release Date: 2005-12-16
Cast: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis, Thomas Kretschmann
Director: Peter Jackson
Screenwriter: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens
Music Score: James Newton Howard
WorkNameSort: King Kong
Our Rating: 2.50

Decades from now, Peter Jackson will remember 2005 not as the year he remade King Kong, but as the year he finally got his weight under control. What happened to all the excess poundage he’s shed since wrapping the Lord of the Rings trilogy? It’s all up there on the screen in the bloated, overwrought, 187-minute Kong, an intermittently fearsome but clumsy colossus that keeps tripping over its own feet.

Start with the disastrous casting of Jack Black as Carl Denham, the sleazebag 1930s movie producer whose machinations set the beauty-and-the-beast tale in motion. There’s little sense in injecting an actor who is incapable of rendering a line unironically into a story that’s set in a time pre-irony. Yet there Black is, choking back the impulse to call everyone else on the screen “dude” as his insufferable Denham sets sail with a shipful of movie folk and colorful sea salts, determined to bring back cinematic gold. The cast of cartoon adventurers includes Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody and Jamie “Billy Elliott” Bell, all of whom join Black in pouring on the self-conscious cutes. Waiting for them to eighty-six the mugging and reach their destination of Skull Island is painful; Jackson has turned one of the most dramatic buildups in film history into a frivolous endurance test. A whopping 75 minutes go by before the trussed-up Ann Darrow (Watts) finally encounters Kong himself – enough time to watch Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride in its entirety.

From there, the film becomes overkill of a different sort, letting the effects department loose to render back-to-back clashes between Kong, the humans and the other gigantic creatures that populate the island. At least this section has a pulse. The dinosaur attacks one-up Jurassic Park, and there’s an extended update of the famous scene in which the titular primate shakes his bipedal pursuers off a tree trunk as if they were puny ants. These action set pieces are all meticulously choreographed, imparting a dizzying sense of height and depth – yet every one of them is allowed to run on too long, belaboring the spectacle while affording us room to pick out the design themes recycled from the Rings flicks.

The final act, which details Kong’s rampage in New York, vacillates between heart-stopping brilliance and ridiculous contrivance. Fleeing Denham’s clutches, the monkey and his gal pal take time for – ready? – an ice-skating interlude in Central Park. Their moony, wordless exchanges show that Andy Serkis, who performs the same human-template function for Kong that he did for Gollum, has gotten carried away with the ability to “act” the ape: His repertoire of facial expressions often far exceeds the emotional range of primates (and of Black, come to think of it).

Kong’s last stand, though, is very nearly the crowning glory of Jackson’s career. That Empire State Building really does seem to go up forever; you don’t just see but feel every biplane zoom and midair lunge, right in the pit of your acrophobic stomach. But Jackson undermines its effectiveness by bringing Watts and Brody improbably close to the action, and by allowing the fatally shot beast forever and a day to expire. (At the movie’s Orlando pre-screening, exhausted audience members began leaving in droves even before he hit the pavement.)

Final thought: It’s dismaying how many key passages have deliberately been played for laughs. Dinos stumble over each other like scaly Keystone Kops, and Darrow first soothes Kong’s fury by performing a goony medley of vaudeville steps, including a soft-shoe and walking like an Egyptian. How odd to see Jackson, whose approach to Kong has been publicly reverential, taking such liberties. Apparently, he feels that his closeness to the material and the time he’s spent remaking it entitles him to “have fun” with the big ape. Making a monkey out of him, I call it.

This article appears in Dec 14-20, 2005.