King Kong
Peter Jackson's ''King Kong" delivers all you could possibly want from a modern popcorn behemoth: state-of-the-art special effects, epic scope and running time, rampaging dinosaurs, things majestically going ka-boom. It's not so much a remake as it is a loving re-creation of the 1933 original on extra-strength steroids, with a side order of Botox. You've seen it all before but most assuredly never like this.
So why did I come away feeling something was missing?
''Kong" reestablishes Jackson as the king of Hollywood gigantism, and plenty of moviegoers will feel like they're getting their money's worth. After an overly drawn-out first hour, the film turns into an E-ticket ride of the first order, with scene after eye-popping scene in which the 24-foot ape takes on T. Rexes, elevated trains, biplanes, and Naomi Watts. There's a brontosaurus stampede almost as terrifying as rush hour on the Southeast Expressway, and a Times Square donnybrook that's a landmark in screen mayhem.
Andy Serkis -- the body under Gollum's digital skin in ''The Lord of the Rings" -- gives Kong enough personality, enough soul, to make you believe he'd tumble for Watts's Ann Darrow, and the director works overtime to create a love story between the two that's substantially deeper than anything offered by the original or the misbegotten 1976 remake.
It's the movie itself that's curiously lacking in soul. Jackson is so devoted to piling modern CGI wonders on the bones of the 1933 classic that he forgets to have much fun. Whether by conscious choice or through the limitations of digital technology, the color scheme in ''Kong" is one of dark, leaden grays. The film is an astonishing machine.
It's also quite nasty in places, in keeping with the original movie and with the director's beginnings in anarchic splatter films. A sequence storyboarded for the 1933 ''Kong" but never filmed finally reaches the screen here: chasing Ann and Kong into the interior of Skull Island, the ship's crew tumbles down a ravine and is attacked by a variety of jumbo insects and beasties, including carnivorous sea slugs that gobble one man down in slimy gulps of peristalsis. This is bravura screen horror -- and definitely not for the kiddies.
Jackson wants to give us a primal experience. Scratch that -- he wants to pound us with primal experiences, but the 75 minutes leading up to the appearance of Kong feel padded and inert. The film establishes the Great Depression, Ann's desperate financial straits, her crush on rising young playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), the panicky attempts of gonzo filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) to hire an actress and set sail for an uncharted island in the South Seas and the rumored thing that lives there.
Once at sea, various crew members are introduced -- Thomas Kretschmann as the captain of the tramp steamer, Jamie ''Billy Elliot" Bell as the crazy cabin boy, Evan Parke as Token Black Guy -- and you have to wonder why, since they're probably all going to be dino kibble soon enough.
The 1933 film got all this over and done with in a matter of minutes, but never mind that. Finally we get to the island, and to Jackson's vision of the natives as an inbred horde of prehistoric savages; the emphasis isn't on ooga-booga political incorrectness but full-on zombie terror. (Anyway, there's enough sublimated racial dissonance later on, in the image of a beautiful blonde in the grip of a dark, bestial stranger three stories tall. Jackson doesn't really go there, but you grad students can.)
Finally, Ann gets picked up by Kong -- hello, gorgeous -- and carried into the island's interior, and the movie's true marvels begin. The director bows low to the original film (I swear some of Kong's movements ape the skittery stop-motion of Willis O'Brien's groundbreaking work) while going for broke in key scenes. Kong fights off not one but three roaring tyrannosauri, and not just on level ground but ensnared in vines while suspended over a crevasse.
Amazing stuff, and there's plenty more where that came from. Serkis's movements, filmed and then digitally ''clothed" with fur, give the great ape a fluidity that can't be attained with puppetry or monkey-suits; this is easily the most believable Kong yet. The sequences in which he and Ann bond are remarkably good-natured -- who knew the big fella could laugh? -- and I for one could have happily spent the entire movie in their company.
But Manhattan calls and there are period cars to be stomped. The final New York section, once Kong has been installed as the prisoner of Broadway, is exciting without being compelling; the sense of connecting the dots of the 1933 film with a heavier digital pen is unavoidable. Brody and Black are back on the scene; the former has little to do given the new rapport between girl and gorilla, and as amusing as Black is, he's too ironic a performer to approach the monomaniacal intensity of Robert Armstrong in the original.
It comes down to, as it must, Kong swatting the attacking planes atop the Empire State Building. This time, though, Ann is begging them to stop, and the film suddenly stumbles into a sense of tragic loss it isn't fully equipped to handle, even with an earlier scene of Kong chained and ''crucified" onstage. In the end, the film's key line of dialogue isn't ''Twas beauty killed the beast," but a character's comment on Denham's ''unfailing ability to destroy the thing he loves." Peter Jackson hasn't destroyed ''Kong" -- I doubt that's possible -- but his love for hollow extravaganza proves to be larger than his love for a great big monkey or a great old movie.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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