Starring Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra, Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens and some utterly useless other humans not worth mentioning. From a story by Terry Rosslo, Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett and a screenplay by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett and Jeremy Slater. Directed by Adam Wingard. Budget $135 million dollars. Running time 115 minutes.
Suffering from a bad tooth, King Kong pops upstairs to Earth from the Hollow Earth for a spot of instant animal dentistry thanks to Dan Steven's stupidly sexy expert veterinarian, Trapper, while Godzilla lays waste to Rome whilst destroying a rampaging monster, then goes to sleep in the Colosseum like a giant cat. With tooth fixed KK pisses off back downstairs and stumbles across an ancient tribe of giant gorillas lead by a gigantic red ape called Skar King who's hell-bent on conquering the Hollow Earth and Earth too with the aid of a superdooper gigantic ice breathing dinosaur beastie called Shimo. Knowing he can't defeat them, KK goes upstairs again to recruit the Big G for a showdown but gets his arm broken and has to have it fixed with a massive metal gauntlet by the super-sexy vet, Dan Stevens, Trapper. Luckily there's this silent tribe of humans called the WeeWee who are guardians of Mothra who are on hand to provide background details on the various wee beasties before it's time for an epic third act showdown that lays waste to Rio de Janeiro, all of Cairo, with whistle stop smack downs in Spain, Gibraltar and the Arctic.
Making 2021's Kong Vs Godzilla look positively restrained and slow-paced in comparison, GKKTNE is the pure epitome of mindless entertainment, for hold no illusion this is without doubt one of the most stupid films I've seen in a very long time. The plot is ludicrous, the acting laminable and characters less than one dimensional. Returning for this ridiculous nonsense is Rebecca Hall's Dr. Ilene, her adopted deaf and mute daughter Jia (Kayle Hottle) and the woeful Brian Tyree Henry as Bernie Hayes a stupid podcast conspiracy nut who almost single-handedly ruined the last film. They're joined by a strangely cast Dan Stevens as the super vet, Trapper. However all they have to do is stare off camera at things react and emote with enthusiasm while spouting reams of pointless and meaningless guff and gibberish. They matter not one jote to the film, as it's not them anyone's come to see. They've come to see Kong and Godzilla hit each other and other things and destroy shit, which they do to great effect.
This starts out quite well in the Hollow Earth with KK but it takes a damn long time for this behemoth to finally get up to speed and get anywhere and when it finally does it doesn't really matter as none of it matters and the plot makes so little sense it's really not bothering with. In fact by the end of this I had quite forgotten how it had all started.
In the good old days of Godzilla films, when it was men in suits hitting each other in scale models of Tokyo the action was great as there was a sense of scale, in this modern day outing and with the 'amazing' advances in CGI we don't need no rubber suited men fighting now we can have pixel perfect creations smacking each other silly and with camera moves that induce vertigo and motion sickness in equal measure. There's a few attempts to mimic the old fights of Godzilla from the 60s and 70s, but over all it's just pixels smacking other pixels while buildings of pixels fall over.
Don't think about the sheer scale of colateral damage in terms of human lives and dollar signs, or cultural significance of the buildings destroyed, nothing matters, just entertainment.
Baxter remarked that early reviews talked about just enjoying this and not thinking about it, cos it's just fun! the message being, don't think, just consume more product!
If you could sleep through all the pointless waffling guff and gibberish spouted by the human actors and just watch the action you'd have a far better experience however the needless and pointless dialogue spewed by the likes of Bernie Hayes and Trapper really slows down proceedings and weaken the film significantly.
Plus there's not enough Godzilla. And the final boss fight is a little too perfunctory.
Loud, long, stupidly dumb insultingly so, but bizarrely entertaining, but only when there's no actors talking and that includes the silent WeeWee tribe.
Not as good as Kong Vs. Godzilla, or the Gareth Edward's Godzilla film, but still vastly better than Godzilla: King of Monsters, Godzilla Kiss Kong, the title makes no sense, which is fine, because nothing in this film makes sense, and yet it was still strangely entertaining, but only in the same way that watching a pigeon getting run over by a slow moving truck's wheel is funny.
Finally, my favourite film of last year was Godzilla Minus One, which managed to be deeply moving, powerful, and seriously entertaining. It was made for a tenth of the budget of this bloated nonsense and packed an emotional wallop that left us dazed and awed by its depth, ambition and drama.
This was the literal polar opposite.
7/10
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