Kong: Skull Island | Creature-feature spectacle and grunts-in-the-jungle thrills. You’ll go ape

By Jason Best
( What's on TV )
published

Kong Skull Island John Goodman Tom Hiddleston Brie Larson John C Reilly
(Image credit: Chuck Zlotnick)

Kong Skull Island John Goodman Tom Hiddleston Brie Larson John C Reilly

Awaken the King.

Cinema’s favourite monster gets a colossally entertaining reboot with a genre blending fantasy adventure that combines creature-feature spectacle and grunts-in-the-jungle thrills. King Kong meets Apocalypse Now.

It’s 1973, the US is pulling out of the Vietnam War and John Goodman’s crackpot explorer is mounting an expedition to an uncharted island in the South Pacific, accompanied by Tom 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 he's the film’s most impressive creation, too, though he never attains the poignancy of the figure in the original 1933 movie. Still, when he rampages, swatting helicopters out of the skies and stomping their occupants into the ground, fans of creature features will go ape.

Certificate 12A. Runtime 118 mins. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts

Kong: Skull Island available on Blu-ray, DVD & Digital Download from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2onxgmKT1fw

 

Jason Best
Jason Best

A film critic for over 25 years, Jason admits the job can occasionally be glamorous – sitting on a film festival jury in Portugal; hanging out with Baz Luhrmann at the Chateau Marmont; chatting with Sigourney Weaver about The Archers – but he mostly spends his time in darkened rooms watching films. He’s also written theatre and opera reviews, two guide books on Rome, and competed in a race for Yachting World, whose great wheeze it was to send a seasick film critic to write about his time on the ocean waves. But Jason is happiest on dry land with a classic screwball comedy or Hitchcock thriller.