A generic Vietnam movie featuring King Kong

Rating: 5/10 (3 May 2020)

This is not a terrible movie, by any stretch of the imagination, I think it has some really good special effects and the actors seem to be trying their best to make this a good movie. However, it's not that either. Kong: Skull Island strives to be mindless entertainment, but for the most part, the movie isn't even that fun or entertaining, for that matter. It feels like a movie made by people who wanted to make a Vietnam film and have seen many Vietnam films, and so they had these check boxes with elements that these films have. You all know them: CCR (and other music from the time), helicopters, shots of these helicopters against the sun, soldier banter, the jungle, etc. I understand what they were going for and if the aim was to check these boxes, then they succeeded, but all of the elements feel like they were put in there to try and achieve this feeling that Vietnam movies have while being a movie that's easy to digest, but it just fails pretty miserably. I think they were going for a similar to Tropic Thunder, which is an example of a lighthearted Vietnam movie that actually works. All of the same elements that I just mentioned are there, but the execution is infinitely better in that film. For a lot of the movie I was simply bored, because it was very predictable throughout and not very well executed, in my opinion. I was also not a fan of the color palette they used, I'm not sure what to call it, but everything is very bright and colorful and it contrasts so much with the idea that this is kind of technically made like a war movie and I think they messed with the colors so that it automatically feels more "light-hearted", but it just didn't work. And also, Kong isn't really in the movie that much, so that was disappointing. Oh, John C. Reilly is also in the film. I usually like him in movies and I like him as an actor in this film, but I felt his dialogue was just very poorly written jokes that didn't work at all for me. Then Tom Hiddleston's character is set up to be this badass soldier assassin or whatever, but he does pretty much zero in the movie except for a single scene that isn't really that impressive or anything.
In general, I didn't particularly enjoy this one, except for the final fight, the special effects and a few other things here and there. I think the final fight between Kong and the lizard monster was pretty sweet, I kind of hope there was more of that in the film. And Brie Larson runs around in a dirty, sweaty tanktop for about half of the movie, so there's that. But in general, the comedy failed for me, as well as almost everything else they attempted. It fails as a comedy, as an action movie, as a Kong movie and also as a Vietnam movie. And maybe it's because they tried to do all of those things at once and maybe they don't mix well. Or perhaps it's that the filmmakers were too incompetent. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but one thing is for sure, I would not recommend this movie.