That podcast is filling your head with garbage. You should be in school.
So I’m gonna try to do some catch-up on my 2021 reviews. I saw a lot of movies in 2021 that I didn’t get around to posting, or even writing, a review on. So, hang on, it’s going to be fast and furious here for a while as I try to catch up. Anyway, where better to start than with this, the best movie that I saw . . . on the day that I saw this movie. I suppose more to the point, it was also the worst movie I saw that day and it is truly, profoundly terrible.
I should go on record that I’m a defender of both Gareth Edwards 2014 Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island, both of which had fun performances that breathed a little extra life into the human characters and were also great adventure films with amazing special effects. So, if you didn’t even like those movies, then this movie will absolutely give you cancer, so stay away. Because this movie just tanks in all the ways those movies worked. Let’s start with the absolutely useless and annoying human characters who are all just awful. I mean, look, here’s hoping The Northman is great, but Alexander Skarsard is not believable as a bookish geologist. Also struggling and failing to stay afloat in this disaster are great performers like Rebecca Hall and Julian Dennison and Kyle Chandler (who, by the way, looks like he’s just rolled out of bed just as the director called Action). And, man, this movie provided me with something I honestly didn’t think was possible: a bad performance by Brian Tyree Henry as a twitchy, conspiracy-obsessed podcast-host (******* kill me now). Eiza Gonzalez is on hand and is still the most beautiful woman in the world, in case you were wondering, but she’s not, you know, good here, as she was in Baby Driver. Again, super-beautiful though, which makes me say something about her that I most certainly will not say about anyone else in this cast: she’s not in the movie enough.
But, hey, who cares about the people? This movie is about Kong and Godzilla duking it out and, boy, does it deliver. I mean, does it deliver? No, it doesn’t. I mean the fights are here, but they’re not very good. The battle on the boats is particularly terrible; I mean, Kong does a John McClane impression jumping off one of the boats at one point and I was just like, “Remember when this character actually moved like an ape and didn’t just look like some intern in a motion capture suit?” If the film has a scene that is visually stunning, it is that second fight between Kong & Godzilla in the middle of a neon-lit cityscape. It’s apparently the first image that came to Adam Wingard’s mind when he was picked to direct this movie. It was also apparently the last, but whatever, that fight actually does look good. Once Mecha-Godzilla appears (oh, spoilers, um, ha ha, actually I don’t give a **** about spoiling this movie, because no one should ever watch it), and, yes, I said Mecha-Godzilla, things just get awful; it’s, you know, Batman v Superman only with an ape, a lizard and a robot. Actually, that sounds more entertaining than Batman v Superman now that I say it out loud, but trust me, it isn’t. Did I mention that this movie also has many scenes inside the Hollow Earth? And that Mecha-Godzilla is apparently possessed by the spirit of Ghidorah? Look, let’s just stop with this, okay? Just . . . just stop. Oh, but, um, thanks for saving movie theaters. I mean, it’s a pyrrhic victory, but if we can just move on, I’ll take it. ½ star.
tl;dr – even as a fan of the previous Monsterverse movies, I can’t find anything here to really enjoy; terrible performances, awful characters, dull action sequences. ½ star.