Kong: Skull Island

Tom Hiddleston heads the cast for this spectacular latest outing for cinema's favourite monster

Tom Hiddleston heads the cast for this spectacular latest outing for cinema's favourite monster.

Set in 1973, as the US is pulling out of the Vietnam War, the film is a colossally entertaining reboot that combines creature-feature spectacle and grunts-in-the-jungle thrills.

John Goodman's crackpot explorer is mounting an expedition to an uncharted island in the South Pacific, accompanied by Hiddleston's ex-SAS officer-turned-tracker and Brie Larson's sceptical anti-war photographer, with Samuel L Jackson's gung-ho army officer and his helicopter squadron providing a military escort.

Of course, the expedition has barely landed on the island before things start going sideways. There is B-movie escapism galore as director Jordan Vogt-Roberts springs an array of weird critters on the island's luckless visitors - from a giant spider to the ghastly reptilian skullcrawlers.

A splendid mix of CGI and motion-capture wizardry, the eponymous Kong is the island's biggest beast and the film's most impressive creation, though he never attains the poignancy of the figure in the original 1933 movie or its 2005 remake.

Still, when he rampages, swatting helicopters out of the skies and stomping their occupants into the ground, fans of creature features will go ape.

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