I know. It's a big picture.
BUT IT'S A BIG FRIGGIN MOVIE!
Okay, okay - I know a three hour movie isn't a big deal anymore. I mean hell, if you tried to watch four of the last ten best picture winners back to back to back to back (English Patient, Titanic, Gladiator, Return of the King) you would have a movie marathon that ran damn near close to a fortnight. But honestly - can we no longer tell a story in under 180 minutes? Hell, I remember when the Berentstein Bears did a damned good job in about fifteen illustrated pages. Too-Tall, Farmer Brown, and all.
Anyway, I digress. This was a good movie. Actually, it was about one miscast lead and twenty extra minutes away from being a great movie.
For those of you who are extremely young, borderline retarded, or have been living in Quebec or Tennessee for the past seventy years, I'll give you a quick summary of the plot so you can catch up with the rest of the world:
Men discover scary island home to strange beasts.
One beast (big monkey) falls in love with girl.
Men take beast back to New York to make money.
Beast escapes, still loves girl, wreaks havoc.
Army kills beast and girl cries.
I know, I know. They already made this movie twice (three times if you count the eerily similar Jurassic Park: The Lost World), but the 1970s version deserves to be forgotten (Jeff Bridges hopes you already have) and the original is more dated than O.J. Simpson jokes.
Enter: Peter Jackson and his developing flair for long, effects-laden remakes of classic tales.
The first two thirds of this movie didn't do a whole lot for me. I didn't care about Carl Denham (Jack Black) and his quest to create the perfect film, mostly because I knew that's not what this movie was going to be about. I might have cared about the relationship that starts to develop between Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) except that the two of them looked like a couple of pre-teens at a bar-mitzvah dance, wondering if they could get coodies by touching each other. Oh, and someone in Hollywood, please: get Adrien Brody something to eat. The man looks like he got hooked on his Pianist diet. A bagel maybe, perhaps a piece of fruit, but I don't want to mistake him for a cadaver every time he walks into frame.
Anyway, Ann Darrow is offered to Kong as a sort of ritual sacrifice, and, after performing a few vaudville tricks for the giant ape, she apparently earns his love and protection. Makes sense. In the meantime, the daring Captain Englehorn and the not-so-daring Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler, giving maybe the best human performance of the film) join an ill-fated rescue team that fights CG dinosaurs that look much less realist than those in Spielberg's films, giant bugs that are about as scary as those in Spaceship Troopers and eventually the King of Kongs himself. By the time they finally capture the ape using a butt-load of ether (how they get him across the lagoon into and into the undersized boat is, naturally, never explained) I was checking my phone for messages and wishing that Century Theatres didn't have an extremely stingy refill policy concerning frozen beverages (by "extremely stingy" I mean "nonexistant").
There is a key shift in the movie at this two hour mark however, as Kong goes from being a three-dimensional monster to an eerily human-like victim of violence and greed. You feel sorry for the monkey as it desperately tries to rescue it's love only to be harpooned and gassed, and again when it is displayed in a New York theatre in front of paying guests. I was reminded, as most people will be, of films/stories like The Phantom of the Opera and Beauty and the Beast. Even without Jack Black's incredibly dorky final line, we get the point of this story. It's one of impossible, forbidden, and innapropriate love. The story of someone (or in this case, something) that is misunderstood by the world, and destroyed for being abnormal. This is the point of the movie all along - so why give the audience two hours of Rambo meets Pirates of the Caribbean meets Jurassic Park meets Adrien Brody's eating disorder? We don't need it. If I want to see dirty island children spearing overweight British people I'll just watch Jackson's Lord of the Rings triolgy, or maybe Muppet's Treasure Island.
I cried at the end of this movie, and at first I thought it was because I was so moved by the love story, so captured by Andy Serkis' amazing performance as the model for all of Kong's features and movements, so mesmerized by the beast's sacrifice.
The more I think about it though, the more I'm wondering if maybe I just cried because I was so happy that those end credits finally rolled.
THE VERDICT: B