Starts off with much promise, then sinks

Rating: 7/10 (7 February 2018)

I was impressed with the first hour of this... we are thrust into the world of a US Army unit busily packing up for the US exit from Vietnam in 1973. Commanded by Sam Jackson this unit gets redirected into a mission to assist a science team to plant "seismic charges" on a remote island. So far, so good, for the first hour this movie has exactly the perfect touch, all the required soldier talk deftly navigating away from the mawkish claptrap we've come to expect from movies of this genre. Jackson's Huey's fearlessly negotiate a truly scary unexplained storm only to find the team landed, crash or otherwise, on a mysterious, primordial island... the same game plan as every other kong movie of the last 30 years really but done much more watchably then most. We meet up with the John C. Reilly character (a truly talented actor who's all but wasted here, as he had plenty of scenes where he could have made the character a scene stealer but he's never let off the leash to do it.) a lost character who has been hanging out on the island far too long.
And with Reilly's character comes the rapid nose-dive of the movie. A whole bunch of way-too-convenient things fall into place just in time for the characters (some long-abandoned makeshift motorboats happen to start right up when the characters need them to, never mind they've been sitting idle since WW2) and the list goes on.
This was an unusual movie as most stinkers start out that way and get worse as they go, with plenty of warning to avoid wasting your time or entertainment dollar. This seems to almost be TWO movies, the one that is and the one that it should have been. That said, might be worth a look if your expectations are kept low - but I for one found the rapid-descent-into-crap a bit unnerving and not to mention, totally gratuitous, unnecessary and baffling... when you have 60 minutes of grade A material, why allow your production to junk the last half of the movie?