Stylish, fun, trashy, and immensely entertaining,

Rating: 7/10 (19 March 2017)

It's official, we finally have a franchise centered entirely around giant monsters. The films in this monster verse include 'Godzilla', 'Pacific Rim', and now 'Kong'. I gotta say, going into this film I expected the worst. I expected it to be the typical Marvel-esque film where it tries a little bit too hard to make you like its characters and ends in an unnecessarily over the top action sequence between an underdeveloped villain. But I'm happy to report that this film is not like that, at all. What is interesting about these three monster movies is that they all feel incredibly unique to the filmmakers. They all have a distinct voice and style that no other "franchise" has. They are very much the director's film. Not the studios.
This is one of the weirdest, most horrifically violent PG-13 studio films I have seen in quite some time. It actually remained me a great deal of 'The Great Wall'. Except this film seems to have a slight sense of self-awareness. This actually shocked me. It almost makes fun of itself and the films that are like it. It has the typical character sacrifice scene near the end except he just gets whipped a mile away from the action and just dies. It's not heroic, he just dies for basically no reason. It's scenes like this that really make this film work. Characters say goofy lines right before getting smashed to pieces, there's tons of color, and the camera is constantly on the move.
In many ways, it feels like a Micheal Bay movie that is actually aware of itself. It knows how dumb it is and it plays it up to ludicrous degrees. I mean, a guy literally gets impaled by a giant ant for crying out loud. If you're taking this film seriously, you're doing it wrong. If you think this is just a typical action movie and aren't open to what is about to happen you'll probably hate this film.
Because it is that typical action movie we all expected. The characters are flat as boards and they don't really do much aside from being smashed to death. Not to mention it features a giant monster that punches other giant monsters in their stupid faces. So, if you aren't ready to accept the fact that this film is almost making fun of itself then you probably shouldn't see this.
However, if you want to see gigantic action set pieces and corny dialogue ripped straight out of the 1980's then boy do I have a movie for you. This is the first massive scale action movie in a long time that is just an action movie. It knows exactly what it is and it doesn't screw around with hardly anything else. It doesn't really bother setting up characters or anything like that. It shows us where all these people are in their lives and then it just goes.
Within twenty minutes King Kong is tearing apart helicopters and crushing people to death. And from then on, the film does not stop moving. It's actually so frantically paced that you really don't have time to think about the paper thin characters or lack of story. It just goes from one action sequence to the next in such haste that nothing else really matters. That being said I do have one major flaw that almost ruins the entire film.
The editing here is an absolute travesty. This film is so poorly edited that it's borderline incoherent. There are scenes that abruptly end and transition into a completely different area featuring the same characters. They will be in one place and without warning the film will cut to an entirely different location at an entirely different time of day but it stays with the same characters the whole time. The editing is so aggressive and rushed that even some of the action scenes move too quickly to get a sense for what is happening.
But, aside from that, this film is thoroughly enjoyable. There a few parts that drag just a bit and that editing is in complete disarray, but I loved this film. It's such a breath of fresh air in a genre over saturated by people wearing capes that we vaguely care about. What 'Kong' does better than so many of these other action movies is that it just is a movie. It doesn't blatantly attempt to set up a sequel or take itself more seriously than it needed too. It knows that it's dumb and it plays on that. It's goofy, overblown, and often times downright weird, yet that's why I love it.