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King Kong (2005)

Average rating

(63%)

Starring:	Naomi Watts \| Adrien Brody \| Jack Black \| Colin Hanks \| Kyle Chandler \| Thomas Kretschmann \| Andy Serkis
Director:	Peter Jackson
Studio:	UNIVERSAL PICTURES UK
Run time:	179 mins
Genres:	Action/Adventure
Languages:	English
Hearing-impaired:	English
Subtitles:	Arabic, Icelandic
Released:	April 10, 2006
Also available on:

It is 1933, and vaudeville actress Ann Darrow (Oscar nominee Naomi Watts) has found herself - like so many other New Yorkers during the Great Depression - without the means to earn a living. Unwilling to compromise and allow herself to sink into a career in burlesque, she considers her limited options while aimlessly wandering the streets of Manhattan. When her hunger drives her to unsuccessfully try to steal an apple from a fruit vendor's stall, she is rescued - literally - by filmmaker and multiple hyphenate Carl Denham (Jack Black).

It seems that the entrepreneur-raconteur-adventurer is no stranger to theft, having that day lifted the only existing print of his most recent and unfinished film from under his studio executives' noses when they threatened to pull his completion funds. Carl has until the end of the day to get his crew onboard the Singapore-bound tramp steamer, the S.S. Venture, in hopes of completing his travelogue/action film. With that, the showman is certain he will finally achieve the personal greatness he knows awaits him around the corner - and although the crew believe that corner to be Singapore, Denham actually hopes to find and capture on film the mysterious place of legend: Skull Island.

Unfortunately for Carl, his headlining actress has pulled out of his project, but his search for a size-four leading lady (the costumes have all been made) has, fatefully, led him to Ann. The struggling actress is reluctant to sign on with Denham, until she learns that the up-and-coming, socially relevant playwright Jack Driscoll (Oscar winner Adrien Brody) is penning the screenplay - the fees his friend Carl pays for potboiling adventure are a welcome supplement to Driscoll's nominal income from his stage plays.

With his newly discovered star and coerced screenwriter reluctantly onboard, Denham's 'moving picture ship' heads out of New York Harbor... and toward a destiny that none aboard could possibly foresee...

Screenshots

Los Angeles Times

A witty comment on the darkness at the heart of adventure stories, a bazillion-dollar spectacle that reserves the right to question the morality of spectacles, and, mostly, a tender love story about a melancholy girl and her tragically misunderstood monkey

Highest rated reviews

44 out of 52 people found the following review helpful:

Rated 4 stars
It Wasn't the Planes...

RJTaylor from from Manchester, 4th January, 2006

Greenery, and green-screenery, abound in Peter Jackson't latest offering. It's good - great, even - but if it's the best film you've ever seen you need to stay in more. I was amazed that after the relatively seamless LotR trilogy, that it was easy to spot some of the joins in the SFX, and the lack of detail in the storyline had me a bit frustrated. The answer to just how they got Kong on that boat all the way back to New York remains a mystery. And towards the end I was a little tired of the CGI-spectacular and wished just get up that damned building so we could get on to the foregone conclusion. But despite my above whinges, I actually really enjoyed Kong. Well worth spending 3 hours of your life on, but I'd strongly recommend you try and see it in a cinema with good sound, or at the very least wait for the DVD release to watch it on a rich mate's great big sound system - certainly the pirates from the pub could never do this movie justice.

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34 out of 43 people found the following review helpful:

Rated 4 stars
Superb!

ATfilmcritic from London, 26th January, 2006

Jaw on the floor. That’s what you’ll be like at the end of this colossal, three-hour juggernaut of a movie. It is a film so huge, vast and awesome in every way that it makes most blockbusters look like low-budget Indie movies.

T-Rexes? Might as well have three while you’re at it. Brontosaurus? Hmm. At least twenty. Stampeding. Yet what makes Kong mark 3 such a truly remarkable experience is its emotional sweep. Just as he did in Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson has been able to put a human face on extraordinary events. There are a lot of special effects, but they never dominate, and never feel intrusive. After all, the best performance is made by a special effect. As brilliant as Jack Black and Naomi Watts are, it is Kong that steals the movie; wry, proud and noble, he is more believable a character than any of the humans around him.

Every film has its little flaws- Adrien Brody remains something of a blank slate- but to criticise King Kong is like criticising a jumbo jet for being too big. Peter Jackson, bravo. You’ve redefined epic cinema.

Again.

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30 out of 32 people found the following review helpful:

Rated 2 stars
Disappointing

GreenwichPaul from , 31st May, 2006

Jackson's King Kong is a spectacular and, at times, successful piece of big-budget cinema but it has one major flaw; its length.

The opening hour is probably a little too long but justifiable in its character development and scene setting.

The Skull Island section of the film, however, is an over-extended parade of CGI. Once we have applauded the magnificence of Kong and the dinosaurs we are then presented with an array of giant bugs and critters which attack the explorers over and over and over, and over again.

The effect is vaguely anaesthetising and certainly spoilt the film for me.

If you make it through Skull Island Jackson does reward the viewer with an excellent finale where he remembers that a film needs a heart and soul as well as special effects. The finale really did save this film from a very lukewarm 3.

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Most recent reviews

Rated 2 stars
Not The King

Jammy74 from , 19th February, 2010

The original 1933 King Kong is a timeless movie that, despite its age, still holds up today. There have been remakes before and now Peter Jackson has had a go. What he has come up with is OK, but it has too many problems to be classed as an improvement over the very first Kong film. Jackson decides to follow the original plot fairly closely, but adds in a few extra bits and pieces to up the action quoitient a bit. This causes two problems: firstly, for all the extra detail and swishy new filmmaking techniques, it means we know the story already so there are no suprises, and secondly, the new content adds absolutely nothing other than filling up the already bloated running time. The effects vary from the really impressive (the battle atop the Empire State at the end) to the very dodgy (the huge bugs in the cavern on Skull Island). The CGI used here is of variable standard, which it often was in Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies as well. Jack Black is good as the scheming Carl Denham, but otherwise the cast do not fair too well. Naomi Watts is wasted and Adrien Brody is too wet to make a convincing hero. Kong comes out of it pretty well though. This isn't a great movie, if you've never seen King Kong, watch the 30s version and for an extra treat watch King Kong Lives, which is so bad it's kinda good (i.e. it's unintentionally hilarious).

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