I Finally Saw King Kong: Now I Know Why He’s Called the Eighth Wonder of the World
“King Kong” is way too long, with director Peter Jackson wasting lots of time making you try and care about the characters when all you want to find out is how real does King Kong look. Naomi Watts is a down-on-her-luck vaudeville actress named Ann Darrow who sleazy film maker Carl Denham, played by Jack Black, tricks into going on a ship to “finish making a film.” Adrian Brody portrays a playwright, Jack Driscoll, who becomes Ann’s love interest, while Kyle Chandler, last seen by anyone in the television series “First Edition”, is a “name” actor who doesn’t quite live up to his image. One of the most unbelievable aspects of “King Kong” is that Naomi Watts’ character doesn’t have a boyfriend. Most of the rest of the cast is there to be eaten by dinosaurs, insects, or smashed by King Kong.
Unless you have been on Skull Island, you know the plot of “King Kong”. An expedition goes to mysterious Skull Island where it discovers the giant ape rules the roost. The local natives sacrifice fair maidens to the goliath, and figure there can be none fairer than Naomi Watts to be found. They got that part right, and kidnap Ann Darrow to make the required attempt to appease King Kong. Why he needs appeasing remains an unsolved mystery, but she is tied to a system of poles and lowered across a chasm to take her medicine. But instead of doing whatever he usually does to these poor individuals, whatever that could possibly be, King Kong takes a liking to Ann and off he goes with her.
The rest of her shipmates finally get around to a rescue attempt, about like a finally got around to seeing “King Kong”. They are in for quite a surprise, as they quickly discover that most of Skull Island’s animal life is prehistoric; when it is done with the rescuers, most of them are history. The Pleistocene Era’s version of the running of the bulls takes place, with brontosauruses instead of cattle, but somehow many of the intrepid rescuers manage to avoid getting trampled. The velociraptor-like predators chasing along with them can be disabled by punching them in the head, but they finally are able to grab an old guy and have him over for lunch.
Meanwhile, the harrowed Ann Darrow has been busy trying to make King Kong take a monkey shine to her, even going so far as to do her vaudeville act for him. Soon, even King Kong can see why Darrow wasn’t making it in show biz, but before he can let her down gently he has to save her from not one, not two, but three T-Rexs. You learn why these short armed denizens went extinct, as they swing and miss at every chance they get to eat the girl. Everybody goes over a cliff, but apparently even if you fall hundreds of feet, you do not die in this movie if you can grab a vine. The resulting trapeze act looks like the big screen version of Donkey Kong, as King Kong gives the T-Rexs a beating while hung up in these vines. After a dramatic scene where Ann decides to side with the Eighth World Wonder in this squabble, King Kong makes wrecks of the T-Rex trio.
The rescue party, recovered from the stampede, tries to cross yet another chasm on an old tree, but King Kong comes along and burns their bridges. The resulting plummet to the bottom kills very few of the men; again, why die from a fall when you can be eaten by insects. Brody’s character, Jack Driscoll, wakes up on the ground in time to notice that every insect-haters nightmare is real. Huge bugs of every sort, not smart enough to eat this meal thrown in their laps while it was unconscious and helpless, do manage to get their share before the rescue party is rescued by a rescue party. Only Driscoll continues on after Ann, while Jack Black’s Denham makes his way back to the native fortress to plot how to capture King Kong.
After saving Naomi Watts several more times, and who wouldn’t, King Kong takes her to his favorite place to see the sunset. How Skull Island could remain a mystery is a mystery to me, since it obviously had an elevation of about 10,000 feet. King Kong, now fully smitten with Ann, falls asleep, and Jack Driscoll arrives to save the day. The pair escapes on a wing and a prayer, the wings belonging to giant bat-like creatures that occupy King Kong long enough for the duo to get away. With King Kong in pursuit, Jack and Ann hightail it back to the safety of the fortress, which turns out King Kong could have gotten into anytime he liked. This he does, and after he makes Swiss cheese out of some more of the expedition, is finally captured when Jack Black breaks a bottle of chloroform over the monkey’s head.
Back to the Big Apple they go, where now Carl Denham will introduce King Kong as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”. He should have grabbed some dinosaurs while he was at it, as King Kong quickly escapes his chains when he thinks he spots his beloved Ann Darrow. Turns out it is a cheap imitation which he quickly throws away, but he hasn’t forgotten how Jack Driscoll stole his love and chases him around the theatre before busting outside. Driscoll leads him a merry chase in a car before King Kong plays traffic cop and puts a stop to it. Before he can give Driscoll a ticket, but not before he has wrecked most of New York, the real Ann Darrow appears and like most beautiful woman, gets her friend only a written warning.
Since it is the dead of winter, King Kong takes his girl ice skating on one of Central Park’s frozen ponds in one of the goofiest scenes ever filmed. Never appearing cold, even though she is wearing only a flimsy dress, Ann Darrow actually looks happy to be spending quality time with King Kong. The date is broken up by an explosion, as the Army has been called in to set things right. Grabbing the girl, King Kong makes his way to the Empire State Building, and goes right to the top with her in tow. Driscoll has to take the more conventional elevator, and arrives after the fact to find that King Kong has been shot down by airplanes. Ann Darrow, who would have died from hypothermia ten times over after being on top of this building half naked, settles for Driscoll after King Kong goes over the edge in the one fall that nobody, not even in this movie, could survive.
Like in the original “King Kong”, Carl Denham gets to utter the famous last line of the film about how it was beauty that killed the beast. His character in the 1933 film was much more sympathetic to King Kong’s fate; here Jack Black plays him as a guy who just saw his meal ticket go kapoot and now faces charges for everything the giant ape did. The 1933 version was such a smash that it spawned an immediate sequel, “Son of Kong”. Let’s hope the latest King Kong couldn’t find time to have kids.
