It's overbaked, overlong, overacted, and overcooked.
The film starts out promisingly enough, with a five-minute montage
of life during the Great Depression, climaxing in a vaudeville routine
by our heroine, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts). But the vaudeville act
never ends. Whether intentional to evoke a nostalgic mood or not,
the dialogue continues as if stolen from a 1930s movie. The
characters say nothing but simplistic, inane lines. The jokes are
pitched to the rafters. The tone is embarrassingly obvious. While
Todd Haynes was able to pull off a retro style in a retro movie with
"Far From Heaven," the leaden Jackson is not.
Suffice to say, Jack Black is terribly wrong for the part. His left
eyebrow is arched in a half-cocked snarl for the entire film. And he
closes the picture with one of the worst, cheesiest lines to end a
major motion picture in years. (Perhaps "...and that, my friends,
was the story of King Kong..." would've been the only more
ridiculous thing for him to say.)
Naomi Watts is very good in a limited role that requires a lot of
screaming and hamming. She gets under the skin of a shallow
character and imbues Ann with depth and feeling that surely wasn't
present on the page. It's an ace performance in a busy dud.
And my, the subplots! There's little Jimmy -- probably the only
literate pre-teen deckhand in cinema history (he's reading a copy of
"Heart of Darkness" on the ship...yeah, right) -- who can't wait to
impress the burly Mr. Hayes with his dinosaur-killin' skills. Then
there's the screenwriter (Adrien Brody) who's locked in a cage that
should've been saved for the trio that wrote "King Kong."
Aside from the admittedly stunning special effects, the only
complexity Jackson has added is in the film's layers of racism. It is
apparently not enough to imply that the innocent white woman is
the only thing that can tame the big, black beast, but the "natives"
of Kong's island are so hyperkinetically bizarre and demonic that
it'd be almost laughable if it wasn't so disturbing.
Waste of time, waste of money, waste of effort.
