‘King Kong’ overwhelms its actors with effects

In theaters

KING KONG, directed by Peter Jackson, written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Jackson, 183 minutes, rated PG-13.

The first 45 minutes of Peter Jackson’s “King Kong” are among the most boring to hit theaters this year. They are pure padding – dull and meandering – with the characters allegedly being fleshed out when it turns out that really there isn’t much to them at all.

At least not in Jackson’s hands. Turn to Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 original film, however, on which this “Kong” is based, and you have a great B-movie on your hands, filled with snappy characters, real drama, heart and action, and an iconic performance by Fay Wray that has become cinematic legend.

Unfortunately, on its way to theaters, Jackson’s $200 million version slipped on a rather big, gaudy banana peel. We’ll call it “self-one-upmanship.”

The director shows no restraint here, just computer-generated muscle. His movie is a disappointment peppered with flashes of what it could have been had Jackson not felt pressed to top his Academy Award-winning “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which is an altogether different beast. For one thing, the “Rings” series wasn’t a love story, which “Kong” is, though you’d be hard pressed to know it until Jackson finally achieves a level of intimacy in key scenes that come well past the film’s midpoint.

Co-written by Jackson and his longtime collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the movie inflates the original’s running time from 95 minutes to more than three hours, which is absurd. The only reason this “Kong” should have been three hours is if it featured Jane Goodall in the sack with the ape. At least that would have made for an interesting show. You can just imagine the canoodling and the conversations.

But no. Instead, we get Naomi Watts as Ann, the out-of-work vaudeville performer with the tough life and the bum luck who is trying to make a buck in New York during the Depression. Hard times, for sure, particularly when your only prospect for work turns out to be removing your clothes at a strip club and slinking naked around a cold pole.

Ann is contemplating that shaky career move when along comes shady filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black, awful), who needs an actress fast so he can skip town and make his jungle movie before his longtime studio tells him he’s through.

Spotting Ann outside the aforementioned strip joint (which, it should be noted, kindly wasn’t an option for her in the original film), he follows her, woos her, and then convinces her to take the lead in his movie. For hesitant Ann, the deal is clinched when Denham drops a key name. The person writing the script is Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), with whom Ann has always wanted to work.

She gets her chance. Soon, all are on a boat and off to Skull Island, where danger awaits thanks to the zombielike locals, who soon make off with a shrieking Ann so they can string her up and offer her to the beast.

It’s here that the movie doesn’t disappoint. With a few exceptions, the worst of which involves a fake-looking chase scene in which several brontosaurs run amok amid humans, trampling them while the actors digitally dart between their legs, the special effects throughout “Kong” are mostly polished.

Occasionally, masterful technical flourishes are achieved, such as when Kong comes up against three T. rexes, which has energy in spite of recalling Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park,” the scene in Central Park in which Kong and Ann play nice on the ice, which is unabashedly corny and romantic, but which nevertheless works in its tenderness, and especially the end of the film, in which Kong takes to the Empire State Building for the final showdown between man and beast.

The irony about Jackson’s “Kong” is that in spite of being a movie in which size matters, the script and the actors struggle to rise up and do their part; they shrink against the technical chaos, becoming almost secondary to the work being done by the computers.

Black is wholly miscast in the role of Denham, playing him like a moustache-twirling villain rather than the flawed opportunist he was in the original. Brody fails to make a connection; there is no heat between he and Ann, no spark, though there should have been if we’re meant to feel anything for them at the end.

As Ann, Watts isn’t the doll Wray was – she doesn’t have her delicacy – but she does best Jessica Lang’s attempt in the 1976 remake and she does connect with Kong in spite of the carnival show Jackson unleashes around them. Indeed, the best parts of this “Kong” are when it just stops, when beauty and the beast can, oh, I don’t know, share some down time together and appreciate a sunset. At least during these moments you feel the weight of their odd bond, which is crucial if Jackson is going to bring audiences to their knees during Kong’s climactic fight.

If it’s spectacle that you want, ignore this review; the movie succeeds in being the year’s biggest spectacle. But if it’s something that recalls the original film that you’re seeking, Jackson’s movie might be too much. In the end, for me, it’s overkill that killed the beast.

Grade: C

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, and Weekends in Television. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.