Kong Gets Gonged

Lileks dissects the King Kong remake so well, he makes me want to see the movie just so I can participate in the mockery. This is brilliant...

Problem is, I didn’t believe anything. I’m willing to suspend disbelief both piecemeal and wholesale; if a movie requires me to believe that Bruce Willis can fight terrorists on a skyscraper for a night, well, fine. If the Lord of the Rings asks that I believe in ghost riders and evil rings and magic and elves, fine. But don’t ask me to believe that Bruce Willis can take six bullets to the brain, or that Hobbits can grow wings and pee fire, unless you’ve previously set them up as a wing-growing, fire-peeing species. Be careful, in other words. If you want me to believe that someone with no weapons training can use a machine gun to shoot the bugs off someone who’s moving around, okay: you’ve spent all your chits. Unless you don’t expect me to believe anything, in which case: why did you make this movie? Because I don’t care.

Take the battle with the T-Rexes. (Three!) Kong saves whatsername from a T-Rex, who’s just abandoned a nice big freshly-killed fellow-saur to run after what would, in Rex dining terms, be a breadstick. He chases her down through the forest, which she nimbly negotiates, but just as he’s about to eat her – he pauses, of course, to roar, one of those little ticks that evolution finely honed in their predatory instincts – Kong comes flying from the County of God-Knows-Where and picks her up, violently whipping her around, snapping her neck and pureeing several internal organs . . . no, strike that, she’s okay. So he battles the T-Rex, and then another one shows up, and everyone’s Kong Fu Fighting, his moves are fast as lightning, et cetera, until ANOTHER T-Rex shows up.

Kong pretty much dusts the guys, even though he takes a couple of bites on the arm – he shakes it off! He’s okay, folks! T-Rex teeth, which are capable of cutting through a fresh battleship, have no power over monkey skin. Then he pushes them down a slope and they go falling off a cliff, but he falls too, with Faye Rae screaming her head off, but vines cushion the blow. Yes, vines! Special lost-world vines capable of holding twenty tons of ape. Did I say 20? Make that 60, because two T-Rexes are also caught in the vines, and then there’s another fight for, oh, sixteen minutes or so. Eventually everyone falls to the ground and there’s another 48 minute battle, and at the end that’s when the blonde realizes that Kong has saved her, and she loves him.

Yes. She loves him. The heroine and the ape have special moments together. They watch a sunset. (The sun is an odd thing in this movie – it goes down only to pop right back up again; Kong begins his rampage on 46th street at about 9 PM and ends up dying on the Empire State Building at sunrise; I don’t care how bad traffic is, it doesn’t take nine hours to get to 34th street. Gravity also works in an odd fashion; it’s sunrise when Kong falls off the ESB, but mid morning when he hits the pavement. So I guess gravity is lesser around there, which explains why he took so long to reach the ground, and why he landed intact instead of blowing fur and monkey guts for a six-block radius.)

You know, it's a bad thing when I enjoy the review more than I would probably enjoy the movie.