If you wake up with a stiff neck, don’t go see King Kong. And if you do go, don’t sit in the second row. Got that?
The first thing to know about Kong is that it’s three hours long.
It’s not a three hours that you really feel, it moves along well enough for the most part (though the ending is fairly drawn out). It’s not a bad movie. I didn’t want my money back. The special effects are stupendous to the point of being over the top. There’s a period of extended action in the middle of the movie that only ends when they finally exhaust every conceivable type of scary monster. I can picture them sitting around Weta studios going “We’ve done dinosaurs and giant centipedes and freaky land-lobsters, what else can we throw at them?” Eventually they got stumped (Did I mention that the movie is three hours long?).
Some of the non-cgi characters (yeah, they still have those, apparently) were fairly good. I especially liked this guy as the heroic ship captain.
The tone of the movie was a bit problematic. It couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a 1930’s-style adventure, or a cheese-fest, or, *gasp*, a serious movie. It kept switching back and forth. Some characters were one-dimensional archetypes, others were trying to be more nuanced. The end result is a big mess. Oh well, we only went to watch a giant ape climb the the Empire State Building, right?