Godzilla Vs Kong

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on April 16, 2021, and ABC Central Victoria on April 12, 2021.

(M) ★★

Director: Adam Wingard.

Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Rebecca Hall, Kaylee Hottle, Millie Bobby Brown, Brian Tyree Henry, Julina Dennison, Demián Bichir, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Kyle Chandler.

Best zoo ever.

It all started so promisingly. The 2014 Godzilla reboot was a surprisingly relevant and impressive update of the kaiju king's legacy that made us care as much about the squishy humans running around beneath its feet as the big lizard itself. 

Then came Kong: Skull Island, a not-bad Vietnam War-era adventure that was both fresh yet faithful to the 100-foot primate and his legacy. This was followed by the poorly received Godzilla: King Of The Monsters - current Tomatometer rating: 44% - but that wasn't bad enough to sound a death knell for the series.

Which brings us to Godzilla Vs Kong, the fourth film in Legendary Entertainment's "Monsterverse" and the supposed pay-off to all that has come before. 

Short review: all the stuff where Godzilla and Kong (and other spoilerific kaiju) fight is awesome. Everything else around it is rubbish.

The plot revolves around a seemingly unprovoked Godzilla attack in the US, despite Godzilla supposedly being one of the good guys following the events of King Of The Monsters. Enter billionaire tech entrepreneur Walter Simmons (Bichir), who thinks he has a way to stop Godzilla and any other titans that come along. But he's going to need the help of Kong, a team of scientists led by Kong expert Dr. Ilene Andrews (Hall), and a young girl (Hottle) with a special connection to the giant ape.

Godzilla Vs Kong has obviously been written backwards from its titular premise. It gets there via a mess of its own mythology, scientific mumbo jumbo, and whatever else stuck when it was thrown against the wall. 

There's a Hollow Earth thing going on, which is magnificent to look at and not even the dumbest idea in the film. Indeed in the film's own internal logic, it's easier to believe that titans came from inside the Hollow Earth than some of the other stuff going on here. A doctor studies Kong for 10 years but doesn't realise Kong knows sign language? Come on. A random scientist knows how to fly a super-advanced hover-jet despite no indication he can fly even a light aircraft? Gimme a break.

It's this kind of broken plotting that gets glossed over with astounding regularity in Godzilla Vs Kong. And that's not even counting the entire subplot involving Brown, Dennison and Henry's characters that is utterly, infuriatingly irrelevant. This part of the film could have been deleted with no detrimental impact on the finished product. In fact, it would have been an improvement, trimming things down to a neat 90 minutes or so.

As it is, despite the best efforts of an earnest cast, the titanic battles are the film's only saving grace. A stoush on an aircraft carrier midway through proceedings is impressive, but only an entrée for the demolition that awaits. There's a tendency to be numbed by these CG-intensive set pieces, but there's an undeniable art to them when done well, and pixel-powered onslaughts in Godzilla Vs Kong are excellent.

But it's not enough to save the film. So dire are in-between bits, you'll be begging for a super-sized smackdown to happen. Better yet, you'll be hoping a few of the top-billed leads will get squashed in the process. It's unfortunate this Part IV can't live up to the series' fine start, but the poise of balancing the human stories with the city-levelling battles is nowhere to be seen in this disappointing sequel.