Godzilla vs. Kong: Thud and blunder

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) • View trailer

Two stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, relentless carnage and brief profanity

By Derrick Bang

Back in the golden age of Universal Studios monster movies, when one character’s popularity began to wane, he’d be set against another.

 

Although completely dwarfed by the massive Kong, Jia (Kaylee Hottle) isn't the slightest
bit afraid of him; indeed, she and the mighty ape share a special bond.

Ergo, we got Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943, followed by the triple-threat of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man in 1944’s House of Frankenstein.

 

And when Universal got really desperate, their monsters became shameful comedic foils for Abbott and Costello.

 

Despite being silly, pratfall-laden spoofs, even they were far more entertaining than this noisy, landscape-leveling dust-up between Godzilla and Kong (this revived franchise apparently having dropped the “King” from the latter).

 

In fairness, director Adam Wingard’s monster mash — available via HBO Max, and at operational movie theaters — is somewhat better than 2019’s thoroughly deplorable Godzilla, King of the Monsters (although, yes, that’s damning with faint praise). Wingard and editor Josh Schaeffer move this entry along more efficiently — at least until the interminable third act — and the CGI animators get a welcome level of emotional depth from Kong.

 

But the major problem, as before, is the script: a sloppily assembled, seemingly random collection of set-pieces populated by — for the most part — stiff-as-a-board characters too vacuous to be regarded as even one-dimensional. (A few exceptions stand out, and I’ll get to them in a moment.)

 

This (ahem) Frankenstein’s monster of a story is credited to Eric Pearson, Terry Rossio, Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields and Max Borenstein, the latter three responsible for writing the aforementioned Godzilla, King of the Monsters. So I guess we can credit Pearson and Rossio with this new film’s slight improvement.

 

Matters begin well, with Kong safely — but unhappily — housed in a huge biodome located on Skull Island (presumably cleared of all the other huge and nasty beasts we met in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, by far the best of these films). He has bonded with Jia (Kaylee Hottle), a young, deaf/mute orphan whom the mighty ape both trusts and — to a degree — obeys, via their shared sign language. This relationship is the film’s strongest note, due to the nuanced sensitivity of Hottle’s performance; she immediately wins our hearts and minds.

 

Jia shares a similarly loving and caring bond with her adoptive mother, Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), an anthropological linguist attached to Monarch, the world government’s crypto-zoological agency dedicated to the study of “Titans” such as Kong. Hottle and Hall work well together; it’s a shame they’re not granted larger roles. Like, in place of everybody else in the film.

Long Shot: Genuinely unlikely

Long Shot (2019) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for strong sexual content, drug use and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.3.19

An engaging premise — with some shrewd topical jabs at our real-world political dysfunction — beats within the heart of this fitfully entertaining romantic comedy.

As proximity encourages increasingly intimate contact, Fred (Seth Rogen) finds his
childhood dream coming true, as Charlotte (Charlize Theron) begins to share his
romantic feelings.

Too bad the charm is so frequently buried beneath vulgarity, relentless profanity and jaw-droppingly lunatic bursts of physical slapstick.

It’s a shame, because — absent such wretched excess — scripters Liz Hannah and Dan Sterling could’ve had a keenly observed little parable. 

Instead, in the hands of apathetic director Jonathan Levine — who most recently gave us 2017’s Amy Schumer/Goldie Hawn train wreck, Snatched — we have yet another failure that tries to satisfy wildly divergent target audiences, and succeeds at neither.

Not that it’s entirely Levine’s fault. Plenty of blame also falls on his frequent acting collaborator, the forever unrestrained Seth Rogen, who rarely misses the opportunity to ruin a scene with his own inimitable brand of overkill. This overly protracted 125-minute disappointment could be a much more manageable 100 minutes, if Levine and editors Melissa Bretherton and Evan Henke were more disciplined about not holding the camera, while Rogen mugs and mumbles interminably.

He simply isn’t as funny as he believes.

Nor does he possess one-tenth of the sharp, savvy comic timing of co-star O’Shea Jackson Jr., who rocks every one of his (lamentably) too few scenes.

Rogen stars as Fred Flarsky, a hot-headed, otherwise talented journalist who frequently sabotages his own sharp commentary by succumbing to a strident tone and raging, ultra-left-wing sensibilities that leave no room for negotiation. He’s his own worst enemy; when his beloved alternative newspaper is absorbed into a conglomerate run by international media mogul Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis), Fred quits in a huff, rather than allow himself to be laid off by a sympathetic editor, thereby retaining unemployment benefits.

Any resemblance between Wembley and Rupert Murdoch is purely intentional. But as is typical of their feeble script, Hannah and Sterling don’t give Serkis enough material with which to make this under-written parody really sizzle. Apparently, we’re supposed to be sufficiently impressed by the make-up work. (Not hardly.)

The Legend of Tarzan: The original jungle swinger is back!

The Legend of Tarzan (2016) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, violent action and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.3.16

The original Tarzan franchise ran an impressive five decades, starting during the silent era and continuing through the late 1960s, when Edgar Rice Burroughs’ famed character finally was silenced by the James Bond-influenced spy movie craze (which the final few Tarzan films attempted to emulate, with predictably awful results).

Having just returned to the African Congo that was his childhood home, John Clayton
(Alexander Skarsgård, right) and his wife Jane (Margot Robbie) take in long-unseen
familiar sights, while their new companion George Washington Williams (Samuel L.
Jackson) wonders what he's getting into.

No doubt hoping to revive what once had been a great thing, Hollywood subsequently mounted a fresh Tarzan roughly once per generation, with little success. Robert Towne’s highly anticipated Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, with Christopher Lambert in the title role, wound up seriously compromised by behind-the-scenes squabbling, and died an ignominious death upon its 1984 release.

Even so, that was a better fate than that suffered by 1998’s dreadful Tarzan and the Lost City, Casper Van Dien’s stint in the loincloth not even a blip on the cinematic radar. Indeed, were it not for Disney’s wildly successful 1999 animated feature, I’m not sure the character would resonate in this 21st century, aside from the ongoing devotion shown by Burroughs fans.

How ironic, then — how pleasantly ironic — that just when the regal jungle lord seemed doomed to extinction, a fresh team has delivered a truly majestic Tarzan film.

We’ve not seen an entry this entertaining since Gordon Scott’s terrific double-header of Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure and Tarzan the Magnificent, back in 1959 and ’60.

Scripters Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer managed a truly impressive balancing act. On the one hand, they’ve faithfully honored the Burroughs template, acknowledging John Clayton as a feral child who grew up in the African wild, but later reclaimed his British roots as the fifth Earl of Greystoke, and a member of the English House of Lords. He’s a deeply moral and perceptively intelligent man (as greatly opposed to the monosyllabic dummy Johnny Weissmüller made him, in so many early films)

At the same time, Cozad and Brewer have addressed contemporary sensibilities, granting John and his wife Jane the enlightened awareness to recognize — and repudiate — the heinous late 19th century imperialism that arrogantly (and arbitrarily) “divided” great swaths of Africa between various European monarchs, who subsequently subjugated and/or enslaved the resident populations.

All that aside, this film also succeeds as an exhilarating adventure that pits the remarkable jungle lord against overwhelming odds orchestrated by a hissably evil villain. Everything builds to a (literally) smashing climax, which drew more than a few enthusiastic cheers from Monday evening’s preview audience.

This is a Tarzan to admire.

Battleship: Deserves to be sunk

Battleship (2012) • View trailer
One star. Rating: PG-13, for intense action violence, mayhem and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.18.12

Battleship is a movie for folks who found the Transformers flicks too intellectually challenging.

Alex (Taylor Kitsch), hurled into command when every other senior officer gets
blown up, shredded or otherwise sliced 'n' diced by nasty alien weapons, seeks
inspiration from the screen monitored by Petty Officer Second Class Cora
Raikes (Rihanna). Now, if she'd burst into song, that might improve this dud.

Erich and Jon Hoeber’s laughably moronic plot would make a great discussion topic in a fifth-grade science class, where 10-year-olds would gleefully pick it to shreds. Let’s start with preposterous coincidence, total ignorance of physical reality, and an invading alien force bearing nasty weaponry clearly capable of wiping us off the planet ... except when the script says no, we can’t let that happen in this scene. Just because.

No lie: At times, for absolutely no reason, the massively armed alien warrior ships simply don’t fire upon our sitting-duck ocean vessels. Beats the hell out of me.

I’d call this flick a cartoon, but that’s an insult to animators. And it’s not even a decent comic book movie, because that genre’s writers have been operating at a much higher level of intelligence since, oh, the early 1960s.

But, then, what should we expect from a film based on a board game?

The one-dimensional characters here, so insubstantial that I’d expect them to blow away in a stiff breeze, speak in clipped grunts that would have been retro in the Cro-Magnon age. I truly worry that if one of these folks attempted a three-syllable word, he’d forget the first by the time he reached the third.

Except for the token Scientific Geek, of course, who’s both a technobabble motormouth and a clichéd liberal wimp: We can’t have those pussies getting in the way of real soldiers determined to wipe this alien scum off the face of the Earth. John Wayne — who you’ll recall turned 1968’s The Green Berets into a notoriously pro-Vietnam War screed — would have loved this flick.

Actually, that’s always been one of my many objections to actor-turned-director Peter Berg. Bad enough that he makes dumbed-down nonsense apparently aimed toward trailer-trash intellectuals; he’s also jingoistic and frequently racist. His 2007 take on our American presence in the Middle East, The Kingdom, traded on wincingly offensive stereotypes, while suggesting that the whole problem could be solved if good ol’ American men and women simply shot every “towelhead” in sight.