Kong: Skull Island

Kong: Skull Island is a grand cinematic adventure powered by furry fury, as the horrors of war blend with chest-beating creature confidence.

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The producer Dino De Laurentiis, a loopy genius who knew a thing or two about big-screen great apes, once said of his own 1976 King Kong star, "When the monkey die, people gonna cry."

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An audaciously loopy creature feature.

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Jordan Vogt-Roberts' King Kong film is set in the 1970s and stars Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson and John C. Reilly.

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Against a bright orange sun, a giant gorilla towers in silhouette, helicopters buzzing around his head like angry insects.

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Though it may not feel fully inspired so much as competently pre-visualized, Kong: Skull Island fits snugly into the growing canon of reboots that exist within ever-expanding movie universes.

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For a beast as mighty and mythic as King Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World has been treated pretty shabbily by Hollywood ever since his still-awesome-after-all-these-years 1933 coming-out party.

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Reboot of the legendary movie monster is a rip-roaring ride that is not monkeying around.

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If Reilly’s presence gives Kong: Skull Island its playful, gonzo edge, it’s the title character himself who gives it soul, morphing from a monster into a brooding symbol of the colossal folly of military belligerence and hegemonic hubris.

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All monster films fall into one of two categories: the kind that takes its time revealing the monster, and the kind that shows you the monster right away and never leaves it for long.

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For a movie in which a major character's death is discovered when a giant lizard-monster vomits out his skull, Kong: Skull Island is a surprisingly breezy affair.

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This skillful old-school creature feature — featuring Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson — hits its marks predictably, but with gusto.

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When the gigantic gorilla star of Kong: Skull Island is onscreen, as well as his other large-scale jungle buddies, there’s serious monkey business on tap.

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In the final days of the Vietnam War, secretive organisation Monarch secures government funding to lead an expedition to a recently discovered island in search of new species. And they find them. Boy, do they find them.

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“Skull Island” has momentum, polish and behemoths that slither and thunder. The sets and creature designs are often beautifully filigreed, but the larger picture remains murky.

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On the whole, though, Kong: Skull Island is great big dumb fun. It’s also shockingly beautiful to look at when you aren’t having creature guts flung into the camera.

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The thing that breaks the back of this movie, and makes the second half so much less prodigious than the first, is a simple matter of geography. Once the combatants are split up and scattered around the island (Packard here, Chapman there, Conrad and Marlow stuck in their own heart of darkness), the story loses focus and even starts to drag.

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“Kong: Skull Island” is a strange sort of monster movie, one set in the shadow of the Vietnam War, where the monsters are misunderstood Pacific natives defending their turf and the aggressors are blundering Westerners probably on some kind of imperialist mission. That’s right: It’s a far-left allegory that could have been called “Viet Kong.”

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The outsize ape returns in an effects-heavy feature set in the Vietnam era.

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Every creature here that's intended to burrow into our nightmares is less a wonder of imagination than of size.

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Tom Hiddleston’s talents are lost in this jumbled jungle caper that repeatedly indulges in anti-climax and silliness.

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