Jackson, maker of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, wastes not a cent on his own $200 million King Kong remake; it is, at various moments, a lively, frantic, noisy and touching spectacle, which is to be expected from a man who claims the 1933 Kong as one of his favorite films. Yet it's turgid and soulless, too -- a nearly note-for-note remake of the Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack original that spares no expense in order to run nearly twice the original's length. He offers us a gluttonous marathon in which no scene can last too long; Jackson's a showman and show-off who stockpiles his movie with thousands of bugs and dinosaurs and spiders and bats that live on Skull Island, but that exist solely on a computer's hard drive. He wants to make sure you ogle every one of his inventions -- and if one of them happens to be a gigantic, turned-on ape, so much the better.
Jackson and writers Fran Walsh (a Jackson collaborator ever since his brilliantly deviant 1989 puppet pic Meet the Feebles) and Philippa Boyens (the Rings movies) adhere so closely to Cooper and Edgar Wallace's 72-year-old tale that the latter deserves top billing. Whole scenes have been copied, whole speeches lifted. Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is once again a starving New York actress, rescued from the streets by jungle-picture director Carl Denham (Jack Black, in way over his eyebrows) after he spies her stealing an apple from a curbside grocer. The hero's still named Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), but no longer is he the captain of the ship delivering Denham's crew to Skull Island; now, he's a spindly writer of plays who, despite his profession, is still awfully nimble with a machine gun when need be.
There's not much plot to Jackson's faithful remake; King Kong remains, as Kael put it, "a tale of two islands," Manhattan and Skull. Jackson begins on the former -- dawdles, actually, waiting a full hour before even landing at Skull Island, which is populated not only by dark-skinned savages who apparently sacrifice every blonde hottie who stumbles ashore, but also by the dino-stars of the Jurassic Park franchise and other swollen creepy-crawly refugees from exploitation pics dating back to the Atomic Age. (The running time had to be three-plus hours in order for Jackson to cram in his tributes.)
Oddly, it's the first Manhattan sequence that has the most life: Jackson's computer-generated New York of the 1930s is a radiant, towering citadel obscuring a grim, grimy reality. As Jackson moves to street level, he shows us haggard soup-line beggars and Vaudevillian showboaters struggling to eke out a meager existence; we're even given a glimpse of Hooverville, the squalid, forbidden homeless camp in Central Park also depicted in Ron Howard's Cinderella Man. It's a fakeout, of course -- to Jackson, people are mere props, talking heads shown in such extreme close-up that he's damn near on the other side of them -- but also a hint of what he could do should he ever again exhibit an interest in telling tales made of flesh and blood and bone.
When at last he drops anchor on Skull Island, King Kong becomes precisely what you expect: a too-deafening video game in which the characters overcome one squishy, sharp-toothed peril after another. Some of the sequences absolutely thrill -- the stampeding dinosaurs, especially -- while still others are stretched till they snap, like twigs in the clench of the giant ape. And Watts is saddled with the unfortunate task of trying to make us love a Kong that looks real only until he shares a shot with her; alas, you never quite forget you're watching an actress feigning tears against a green screen.
Jackson can easily afford to make a love letter to his favorite movie and cram it with in-jokes and garish special effects. Surely, he loves the film because he sees something of Carl Denham in himself; we giggle when his studio bosses dismiss him as a maker of extravagant, expensive pictures that have made Carl only a "near-success." But Jackson is merely indulging himself here, too, doing a thing not because he should, but because he can. And maybe that's a good reason, but not good enough. The girl still cries, the ape still dies, and all you're left with is a ringing in your ears.
