• Home
  • Movies
  • Music
  • TV
  • Video Games
  • Wrestling
  • Topics
  • Latest Comments on Cult of Whatever
Search
Cult of Whatever logo
  • Movies
    Featured
    • The Living Daylights: Timothy Dalton as James Bond

      The Living Daylights is still awesome, thirty-five years later

      By Matthew Martin
      | March 28, 2022
      Movie Blogs
    Recent
    • The Muppet Christmas Carol: Michael Caine as Scrooge

      The Muppet’s Christmas Carol remains the gold standard for the book

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 20, 2022
    • Nightmare Before Christmas 1993 1

      2022’s Christmas Movie Watchlist!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 18, 2022
    • Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Poster

      REVIEW: GDT’s Pinocchio is my favorite film of the year!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 14, 2022
    • Troll: Ine Marie Wilmann as Nora

      REVIEWS: TROLL and TROLL HUNTER -A giant creature double feature!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 5, 2022
    • Harry with The Hendersons

      Harry and the Hendersons is still awesome, thirty-five years later

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 1, 2022
    • Fantastic Four Poster

      The five best “rogues galleries” in superherodom! (part 3)

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 28, 2022
  • Music
    Random
    • Led Zeppelin 1977 Promo

      Fifty years of Led Zeppelin

      By Matthew Martin
      | March 4, 2019
      Music
    Recent
    • The Beatles: Get Back

      What GET BACK reveals about the Beatles

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 15, 2021
    • Simon And Garfunkel at Feyenoord Stadium in Rotterdam1982

      The Boxer is a song about being conned

      By Matthew Martin
      | July 4, 2021
    • Lady Gaga: Chromatica Album Cover

      Lady Gaga’s discography is totally out of order

      By Matthew Martin
      | June 3, 2021
    • Michael Jackson Thriller Album Cover

      Thirty years ago music fans said “Nevermind” to Michael Jackson

      By Matthew Martin
      | March 21, 2021
    • Queen II Album Cover

      On Queen’s The Miracle, and the importance of track ordering

      By Matthew Martin
      | February 16, 2021
    • Linda Paul Mccartney 1976

      50 years ago, McCartney dropped “Lennon” and went solo…

      By Matthew Martin
      | June 5, 2020
  • TV
    Featured
    • Big Sky S03e05: Kylie Bunbury, J. Anthony Pena and Katheryn Winnick as Cassie Dewell, Mo Poppernak and Jenny Hoyt

      Big Sky S03E05 Review: Flesh and Blood - Glamping!

      By Salome G
      | October 22, 2022
      TV Blogs
    Recent
    • Big Sky S03e10: Gang

      Big Sky S03E10 Review: A Thin Layer of Rock – Break time…

      By Salome G
      | December 11, 2022
    • Rick And Morty: S01e03

      Is Beth from Rick and Morty a bigger sociopath than Rick?

      By Jason Collins
      | December 7, 2022
    • Big Sky S03e09: Dedee Pfeiffer and Cree as Denise and Emily

      Big Sky S03E09: Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire – Stalling

      By Salome G
      | December 1, 2022
    • The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special: Dave Bautista and Pom Klementieff as Drax and Mantis

      REVIEW: The GOTG Holiday Special is a sweet prelude to next year’s finale

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 27, 2022
    • The Midnight Club S01: The Gang

      The Midnight Club S1 Review – A series of unfortunate events

      By Salome G
      | November 24, 2022
    • Big Sky S03e08: Reba McEntire as Sunny Barnes

      Big Sky S03E08 Review: Duck Hunting – I love a weirdo.

      By Salome G
      | November 19, 2022
  • Video Games
    Featured
    • Arkham Knight

      Batman: Arkham Knight - A fitting end to a trilogy

      By Tom Farr
      | July 18, 2015
      Video Game Reviews
    Recent
    • Splatoon 3 Screenshot

      A trio of Nintendo Switch reviews!

      By Matthew Martin
      | September 28, 2022
    • Nintendo Switch Logo

      Looking ahead to the Switch 2: Predictions and Wants

      By Matthew Martin
      | August 15, 2022
    • Legend Of Zelda

      Can a Legend of Zelda movie work?

      By Matthew Martin
      | April 6, 2022
    • Super Mario 64

      Which system had the better launch: A battle of four Nintendo consoles

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 1, 2021
    • Luigi's Mansion

      Happy twentieth to Nintendo’s underrated gem, the Gamecube

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 18, 2021
    • Metroid Dread

      Metroid Dread – Post Game analysis and sequel needs

      By Matthew Martin
      | October 29, 2021
  • Wrestling
    Featured
    • AEW All Out 2022: Keith Lee. Anthony Bowens, Max Caster and Billy Gunn

      AEW All Out 2022 - Review and (wild) Speculation!

      By Matthew Martin
      | September 5, 2022
      AEW
    Recent
    • WWE WrestleMania 38: Cody Rhodes vs. Seth Rollins

      Was 2022 the wildest year in wrestling history?

      By Matthew Martin
      | January 4, 2023
    • AEW Full Gear 2022: Young Bucks and Kenny Omega Elite Entrance

      AEW Full Gear 2022 – A needed reset at the end of a tough year

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 22, 2022
    • WWE Survivor Series 1997: Bret Hart

      The Montreal Screwjob – Twenty Five Years Later

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 8, 2022
    • AEW Grand Slam 2022: Jungle Boy and Rey Fenix

      AEW GRANDSLAM 2022 showcased the present and future of the promotion

      By Matthew Martin
      | September 25, 2022
    • AEW All Out 2022: CM Punk

      AEW All Out Fall Out: All the CM Punk drama that’s fit to print!

      By Matthew Martin
      | September 5, 2022
    • AEW Dark: Ricky Starks (22/09/20)

      The future of the AEW World Championship

      By Matthew Martin
      | August 14, 2022
  • Topics
    • site logo
    Latest
    • Was 2022 the wildest year in wrestling history?
    • The Muppet's Christmas Carol remains the gold standard for the book
    • 2022's Christmas Movie Watchlist!
    • REVIEW: GDT's Pinocchio is my favorite film of the year!
    • Big Sky S03E10 Review: A Thin Layer of Rock - Break time...
    • Is Beth from Rick and Morty a bigger sociopath than Rick?
    © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

    Spoiler Free Review: KONG: SKULL ISLAND is a total dud

    By Matthew Martin
    | March 12, 2017
    Movie Reviews
    © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
    © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

    Spoiler Free Review: KONG: SKULL ISLAND is a total dud

    By Matthew Martin
    | March 12, 2017
    Movie Reviews

    Well that was a wet fart.

    Sometimes you can just feel when a movie is going to be a big hit, no matter how unlikely it should be as a success. Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, is a movie staring a wrestler, a side character on an NBC comedy, a giant tree-man and a talking racoon. No one knew what to make of it and many were thinking that Marvel had let their ambition exceed their common sense. Then the first trailer hit and everyone just “got it.” From then on the movie was almost-destined to be a smash, and it was.

    And then are those movies that look like they are duds and the studio seemingly knows it too. Bye Bye Man was moved from October (primetime for horror movies), to June (reserved for the cream of the crop summer films where it was sure to get lost), and then moved again to January (where movies go to die). All signs pointed to the film being a stinker and it delivered on that promise in stellar fashion.

    But the most tragic of all, is when a studio makes a movie they clearly are jazzed about. They give it a big advertising budget, they talk it up to shareholders, they ambitiously plan for multiple sequels and they strut like a peacock to opening night, ready for their movie to blow everyone away.

    Instead it just blows.

    Kong Skull Island Poster

    KONG: Skull Island (henceforth just KONG) is the second movie in a planned-shared universe of films based around Godzilla, King Kong and various other kaiju properties. The first was 2014’s Godzilla; not to be confused with, say, Shin Godzilla, which came to limited western theaters but was mostly an exclusively-Asian property. KONG is a follow-up (though set in the past) to the Godzilla movie that Legendary Pictures produced a few years ago. That movie was a good-enough reboot of the franchise that some criticized for focusing too much on the human characters and not enough on the titular monster himself. When the movie did finally show Godzilla, it was mostly through obscured angles. The best look we get of him was…at night…in the rain.

    The team behind KONG heard those complaints and properly ran as far in the other direction as possible. The result is a movie with no discernible or memorable characters to speak of, but with plenty of hot monster-on-monster action to satisfy the crowd of ticket buyers that keeps Michael Bay employed.

    Only Michael Bay didn’t direct this. Jordan Vogt-Roberts did, as his first major film. It’s quite a lot to put on a first-timer, expecting him to continue the momentum on a still-young shared-universe (whose connection hasn’t even been explored yet), while also telling a story that does justice to its namesake (King Kong is the original monster movie, filled with action and pathos in equal doses) as well as being a good film on its own. How does he do?

    Not good.

    There are three big problems with this movie and one redeeming virtue: The acting is terrible, the beautiful environment is frustratingly filmed, being hidden behind many tight shots, the screenplay is horrendously, staggeringly awful, but—on the plus side–the action scenes are impressive to behold.

    On the subject of the acting and the wasted environment, those failures fall squarely on the shoulders of the director. Granted, not everyone can be Michael Fassbender or Oscar Isaac out there, but that just means it’s up to the director to help them get the best performance out of the actors as possible. Corey Hawkins and Toby Kebbell (who keeps getting cast in movies despite never impressing) need all the help they can get…and get none. Lines are delivered like they never read the script and just had someone off screen radioing them the lines for them to repeat on camera. Everything is flat, stilted, disconnected from the movie. Expressions don’t match up to the words being said; characters crack jokes with faces that are trying to convey dread or panic. That’s on the director.

    And then there are the established, well-known and proven to be great actors. Richard Jenkins is a good actor; great even. He has one scene in this movie and it’s wretched. He moves around the scene like he doesn’t know where the camera wants him, because the man behind the camera isn’t giving him any guidance. Sam Jackson does okay but he really only has two roles in all his movies; he’s either “good guy Sam Jackson, cool and in control” or he’s “bad guy Sam Jackson, unhinged and rage-filled.”

    But then there’s John Goodman. As much as I love him (he deserved an Oscar nomination for 10 Cloverfield Ln.), this was one of the worst performances he’s ever given to a movie. And it’s not his fault. The screenplay required his character to spend the first 30 minutes rambling on with meandering, exposition-heavy lines. In the right part, John Goodman can be phenomenal. But you have to play to his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. Goodman’s voice is a tricky thing; it’s always had a kind of throaty, grating sound to it. It works fine when he is given short bursts of dialogue, but when he has to ramble on and on, it hurts. Also, every line of his sounded like it was dubbed in post-production. That’s common when you’re on location and there’s too much ambient noise to capture the dialogue from the shoot, but the early scenes take place in offices and hallways, yet Goodman sounds like his words were rerecorded via ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording). He always sounded like he was recording lines for a commercial. Again, that’s not Goodman’s fault. He’s been a pro for thirty years. He shouldn’t ever be this bad.

    Skull Island Kong John Goodman

    Other than that, there’s the matter of the look of the film. A lot of this movie was filmed outside of the sound-stage, giving the environment a natural feel that you can’t replicate (you can only supplement) with computers. But for some reason, Vogt-Roberts kept the vistas in the background and focused the camera in tight on just the faces and upper bodies of the characters. Occasionally we’d get a bit sweeping shot, but rarely (if ever) was the environment allowed to be a character along with the cast. Instead, there’d be a big establishing shot of the gorgeous surroundings, and then whenever characters would talk, everything would be shot tight on their dead, expressionless faces.

    Skull Island Kong 1

    And speaking of the characters talking, there’s the matter of the screenplay, which is laughably bad.

    Three different people (not a team of three) are responsible for this mess of a story, one of whom is an Academy Award nominee (but then so is Akiva Goldsman, and he still has to wear Batman & Robin around his neck like a badge of shame). The script in this movie breaks the two major rules of screenwriting: Give me someone to care about and give me a reason to care about them.

    The biggest problem with the story is that there are too many characters, with too little to do, and not one of them is the clear and obvious person to rally behind as the audience. As a result the audience becomes an emotionally-uninvested spectator in the goings-on, despite how desperately the movie wants you to feel and react to what happens. It’s one thing to have moments of drama and loss in an action movie (and in fact, it’s good to have those moments, otherwise the action grows boring), but when the audience isn’t given a reason to care about the characters or if those characters die in pointless ways, it makes the ham-fisted, slo-mo scenes of sadness and poignancy tedious.

    This movie had characters you won’t care about dying, making their deaths wasted…AND those same deaths will occur in pointless ways. It was almost a running gag by the end of the movie, as characters hoping for a noble sacrifice are squashed like bugs, unable to die for any real purpose. And yet I’m supposed to care? That’s not how it works.

    Skull Island Kong Brie Larson Tom Hiddleston

    Furthermore, all of the deaths in the movie happen to characters that are either bad guys (in which case, you’re supposed to root for their demise) or good guys with so little to do in the movie that their deaths will mean nothing. Again, if the cast of a literal dozen was cut down to, say, six or seven, then so much of that spread-around dialogue could have been consolidated into fewer characters, allowing the audience to bond with them, making their deaths a little more poignant. The only time in this movie, where a death might have had some resonance was with the only side-character given any kind of background. But in his case, he was so terribly written and forced to spout-off cheesy, stupid dialogue, that I didn’t even mind seeing him get got.

    And speaking of the dialogue, holy cow was this a badly written movie.

    Every other line is exposition, and not the acceptable and sometimes needed kind, where quick little asides are spoken to fill the audience in while the story moves forward. No, this is the really bad kind of exposition, where the whole movie just stops while someone plays the part of narrator, walking the audience through the movie step by step. Attempts to lighten up the movie with humor failed as well, with almost every single joke falling flat. But the jokes kept coming, and often at totally inappropriate moments, leading to a tone that is wildly inconsistent. It’s one thing to have comic relief in the middle of a tense action movie (and when done right, it’s great) but this went so overboard with the bad jokes, the movie felt like a spoof at times.

    Despite maybe fifty jokes of varying sizes, there were only two times that a human character elicited a positive reaction out of me: The first came when Sam Jackson’s character said “Hold on to your butts.” If the best line in your movie is a wink to another, far better, monster movie, you got problems. The other great line came from John C. Reilly, whose character best exemplified this tonally-inconsistent movie. At one point while a group is camping outside, Reilly’s character mentions that they need to be wary of giant ants that sound like birds. Reilly’s word choice, timing and delivery was so effortless I’m convinced it was an ad-libbed moment. It was the only line of dialogue in the whole movie that felt “natural.”

    But there are positives to be found, namely when it comes to the monsters themselves. Unlike in Godzilla, King Kong shows up in his movie early, often, and in broad daylight. Various other monsters are peppered throughout the film, and almost all of them are inventive and clever. In fact, the only creature that did not impress me was, fittingly I suppose, the primary “bad guy monsters” of the movie. Their design felt unfinished, generic and bland.

    Skull Island King Kong

    But without characters worth caring about, the big spectacle action scenes lose any significance. It just becomes “noise.” The original King Kong focused on three human characters and one giant ape with more “personality” to be shown and “story” to be told, than anything given to us in the newest version. KONG: Skull Island will probably be the number-one movie this weekend. It will have many people talking about it, but what they’ll be talking about is pretend monsters fighting each other. That’s cool and sometimes legitimately impressive to behold, without any humanity, what we’re left with is a hollow, tone-deaf, terribly written, acted and directed movie.

    4/10 – This is a movie you will rent to show off your TV’s new sound system. But after the three or four big moments are over, you’ll be left with not much movie left to enjoy.

    Do not see Kong. See Logan twice.

    Share this article:

    Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit

    Tags

    GodzillaKing KongSkull Island

    COMMENTS

    Please read our Commenting Policy before you join in with the discussion.

    Note: If you have email notifications enabled, please check your email spam folders to ensure emails are not missed.

    Subscribe
    Connect withD
    I allow to create an account
    When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website. Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account.
    DisagreeAgree
    Notify of
    guest

    Connect withD
    I allow to create an account
    When you login first time using a Social Login button, we collect your account public profile information shared by Social Login provider, based on your privacy settings. We also get your email address to automatically create an account for you in our website. Once your account is created, you'll be logged-in to this account.
    DisagreeAgree
    guest

    0 Comments
    Inline Feedbacks
    View all comments

    You might also like

    • Spoiler Review: LOGAN is a masterpiece of brutality and raw emotions

      By Matthew Martin
      | March 5, 2017
    • Review: A Monster Calls is a powerful movie about hard truths

      By Matthew Martin
      | January 8, 2017
    • Shin Godzilla Review: Filed with all necessary paperwork.

      By Matthew Martin
      | October 25, 2016
    • 2017’s Big Movie Year

      By Matthew Martin
      | January 6, 2017
    • 2017: Marvel’s biggest year so far?

      By Matthew Martin
      | February 7, 2017
    • CONAN THE BARBARIAN is still awesome, 35 years later…

      By Matthew Martin
      | January 9, 2017

    FIND THE TOPICS YOU WANT...

    Movie Topics

    Recommended for you

    • REVIEW: GDT’s Pinocchio is my favorite film of the year!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 14, 2022
    • REVIEWS: TROLL and TROLL HUNTER -A giant creature double feature!

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 5, 2022
    • Harry and the Hendersons is still awesome, thirty-five years later

      By Matthew Martin
      | December 1, 2022
    • The five best “rogues galleries” in superherodom! (part 3)

      By Matthew Martin
      | November 28, 2022
    • Spirited Away remains Studio Ghibli’s “greatest” film

      By Matthew Martin
      | October 16, 2022
    • Read the Book Instead: The most disappointing book-to-film adaptations

      By Oliver Johnston
      | September 20, 2021
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Affiliate Disclosure
    • Cookie Policy and Settings
    • Terms of Use
    • Photo Credits
    • RSS
    All Cult of Whatever articles, logos, illustrations and graphics are copyright CultOfWhatever.com. All other trademarks, logos and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. © 2021 CultOfWhatever. All Rights Reserved.
    • facebook
    • twitter
    wpDiscuz