King Kong (2005)

All three in my viewing party (40-ish male, 40-ish female, 20-ish male) back in December agreed that this was the most intense--and long--movie we had ever seen--longer than every Lord of the Rings movie but the final episode! The brontosaurus chase-and-tumble scene in particular showed such intense and extended permutations of peril that I finally burst out laughing, saying, "Oh, come on, this is ridiculous!" I should say that given my love for J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson's cinematic versions should be my favorite movies of all time; but they mostly gloss over the spiritual heart of the books to nearly pillory us with hours of nonstop action and CGI. Kong tries to trump Rings with more of the same, yet some of its CGI is visibly flawed, and clearly someone should have told Jackson at some point, "Enough already!" Jack Black did better than I would expect in the lead role, but the whiff of his hackery remains, and finally overpowers, as he enunciates The Moral of the Story, clear as a cracked bell, at the tale's ending toll. I believe the word is overwrought. Simply too much, and not all smoothly portrayed. This film's only salvation is to be found in Andy Serkis and Naomi Watts. Serkis endows an evocative moodiness to Kong that more than bests all the other ciphers on the screen, he proves groundbreaking in the emotions he can evoke from a sympathetic CGI character (more so than Rings' complex, if often cartoonishly rendered, villain Gollum). Meanwhile, Watts emoted her heart out against the blue screen to which Kong would later be digitally added; she should have received best actress. This film could have received five stars if it had gone on a diet instead of a binge. Indeed, as the young man in our party said, he would have given the movie five stars for its sheer grandiosity, but he dinged it one star because it made (even) him get teary-eyed. Four stars.