Flat, soulless addition to the Kong staple

Rating: 4/10 (11 April 2017)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
It is 1973, the Vietnam war is coming to an end and a couple of scientists, headed by Dr. Bill Randa (John Goodman) persuade congress to fund a trip to a far off island to examine some environmental effects (or something.) They assemble a crack team of experts, including Colonel Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson), James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) and photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson), and head off, but what they don't expect to encounter is an undiscovered tribe of natives, and an island inhabited by monsters, most notably, the massive, mighty Kong. Things get heated when men are killed and Colonel Packard turns hostile.
It's pretty safe to say that Kong is one of the most enduring franchises in film history. Since his first outing in the early thirties, he has been re-adapted for the screen several times, with varying degrees of success, but it's probably retained a lot of its appeal by sticking to a period time frame, at least in the 2005 version I saw, while I'm not really sure about the lambasted 1976 version that I didn't. By never branching out into present day and keeping a nostalgic sense of times gone by to give it a distinctive touch. And so this new addition has rolled by, but in spite of some awesome special effects, it's a totally underwhelming spectacle compared to the ones that have gone before.
Another device the previous instalments of Kong employed was to build up a great sense of mystery and awe before the great beast unveiled himself on the screen, creating a sense of foreboding and tension before he is seen, yet in Jordan Vogt-Roberts's flat imagining, he appears almost immediately upon arrival at Skull Island and it just gets more derivative from there. Not that you'll care about the fate of anyone, as an all star cast manage to portray a selection of the most bland, stalemate characters you could ever imagine, compered with an implausible non-entity of a plot.
The effects are as awesome as ever, but this just doesn't have anything else going for it to justify such a lengthy running time. **