KING KONG (2005)

 Starring:Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody, Jack Black, Colin Hanks, Evan Parke, Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis. Drama/Fantasy/Remake Synopsis: A struggling movie director with an unique vision takes his cast and crew on a voyage to shoot a movie with no financial backing, instead landing on a mysterious and unknown island where they encounter all manner of wonders, particularly a 25 foot ape who captures the heart of the leading lady and is eventually brought back to New York City.

If someone asked me to name the 10 best young actors/actresses ("young" being a relative term), two names that would be in my top 10 would be Adrien Brody and Naomi Watts, no question, especially for Ms. Watts. Those two are the primary reason I got around to checking out King Kong on DVD, as the classic story (franchise really) of the big ape has never really appealed to me, and I have never gotten around to watching either of the two previous stories of Kong (With Fay Wray in 1933 or Jessica Lange in 1979...I think) 

So, it kind of pains me to say that this film didn't do much for me at all. The acting is good, but you kind of expect that with a cast like this. It's just the story...well, its a little too far out there for me, even as a fantasy, to really care about the characters or to believe the "romance" between actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) and the big gorilla.

The film starts out with a pretty good setup/background of some of our main characters. We meet the struggling director (Jack Black) and struggling vaudvillean actress Ann Darrow and we can quickly appreciate their circumstances in Depression era Manhattan. Black is a director with a unique vision and a dearth of scruples who takes after learning that his financial backers are not going to fund his next project, but before they can actually fire him and take back the stock footage that he has already shot.

It seems that he has a vision for a movie to be shot in a faraway, exotic locale, a place that no one knows about (but that he incredibly has a map to) and he just needs to find his leading lady, which he does literally on the street hours before the ship sails.

While on board with this motley crew of actors as well as the actual crew, a budding romance develops between the writer who was actually tricked into coming along, Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody The Jacket) and Ann Darrow. The film actually does a credible job of showing us the chemistry between these two, which makes it even harder to understand the affection that Ann Darrow will later have for this ape.

Also on board the ship, we witness a strong relationship between two of the crew members, but is never explained or developed, ending with the death of one (Evan Parke) at the hands of Kong himself, again raising a question, at least for me, of Ann Darrow's instant affection for an animal that has killed men trying to save her.

Alas, not the only question that I had in the film, which really stretched my suspension of disbelief quotient, such as: where did Jack Black get the map to the island that knows about? How did the blue people manage to survive on an island with giant apes, dinosaurs, and insects without any modern weapons such as guns? Where did the huge jugs of chloroform come from and why did the crew on the ship just happen to have them? How did the crew and actors get Kong on the little boat back to New York? How could the boat support Kong's weight? How does Jamie Bell's character manage to hit all of those huge bugs attacking Adrien Brody's character with a machine gun while his eyes are closed?

I could go on, but you get the point...a little too far fetched for me, even given that you go into a movie like this understanding its fantasy. To me, the fantasy is that, o.k., "if there were really 25 foot apes, it might happen like this..." But, I just couldn't get there with this film.

Brody and Watts do a good job, but it's not enough to save this film from mediocrity. The real standout is Jack Black, who is wonderfully sleazy in his role and his character benefits from having the best of a suspect script.

The best part of the film, of course, is the CGI and special effects. In fact, it almost seems as if the story was put together to compliment the effects, instead of the other way around.

King Kong is, by no means, a bad film, and the youngsters will no doubt appreciate it very much. But, with such a time tested franchise and with such good actors, it should have been a lot better.