Review: 'Godzilla x Kong' brings back the monsters to fight off new creatures, but it's more ridiculous than actually fun
The latest smash-up mash-up, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” is as nonsensical and ungainly as that Frankenstein’s monster of a title. (What is that “x” supposed to signify? A multiplication lesson? Product placement paid for by Elon Musk? Godzilla writing Kong a love note with a kiss at the end?)
Director Adam Wingard picks up where his 2021 “Godzilla vs. Kong” left off. Godzilla roaming the Earth and, in the words of lead Godzilla expert Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), “fighting the battles we can’t” with rogue skyscraper-bashing monsters — and napping between battles in Rome’s Colosseum. Kong is in Hollow Earth, the land that time forgot inside the planet, keeping the peace with the various critters there.
Andrews’ job is to shepherd the resources of the mysterious megacorporation Monarch — which had its own series on Apple TV+, because Marvel doesn’t have a monopoly on overextending franchises — to keep Godzilla and Kong separated. Andrews is also trying to be a good mom to Jia (Kaylee Hottle), her adopted deaf pre-teen daughter, the sole survivor of the Iwi tribe on Kong’s old home of Skull Island. (Yeah, I forgot about all this stuff from the last movie, too. It’s not like that stuff really matters, though.)
The Monarch outpost on Hollow Earth starts getting strange radio interference, in a pattern that Andrews realizes (well after the audience does) matches the drawings Jia has been making at school. Jia figures out it’s a distress signal, coming from someone or something down below. Andrews leads a mission to find out what it is, taking along Trapper (Dan Stevens), a ludicrously daredevil veterinarian; Harris (Ron Smyck), a no-nonsense pilot and soldier; paranormal blogger Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry), left over from the last movie; and Jia, who convinces her mom that she can help them deal with Kong.
Down in Hollow Earth, the party finds plenty of dangers and wonders — and, in conveniently parallel story construction, a chance for both Jia and Kong to discover that they aren’t the last of their kind. Much of the plot exposition, in a script credited to three writers (with Wingard sharing story credit with two of them), falls on Hall, who’s a better actor than this movie deserves, and enough of a trooper to make the silly explanations sound scientifically plausible.
Besides Hall and Hottle, an engaging young performer, the human stuff is boring filler in between the monster action. Those scenes are somewhat engaging, though seeing a hyper-realistic Kong tearing apart some pig-dog beast over his head so that its guts spill on him like green Jell-O isn’t as fun as it sounds. Seeing Godzilla consuming radiation to make himself Barbie pink is an interesting choice, if not a callous bit of cross-branding from the movie’s distributor, Warner Bros. These are the things that go through a critic’s head when there’s not enough in the movie to keep him engaged.
The most annoying part of “Godzilla x Kong” is that there’s no sense of stakes, for the monsters or the humans who try to stay out of their way. Compare this movie to last year’s “Godzilla Minus One,” and it’s clear that the character’s Japanese originators still have a better handle on what makes Godzilla fearsome and tragic — and more than the sum of its computer-generated parts.
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‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’
★★
Opens Friday, March 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for creature violence and action. Running time: 115 minutes.