Someone watched a James Gunn movie. Vaporwave aesthetic, late 70s/80s soundtrack, “comedy”. Unlike James Gunn I’m not sure any of it works. The movie looks kind of cool, especially CGI lava, but that and Dan Steven’s charm will only get you so far.

And speaking of comedy, I like Brian Tyree Henry. It’s not his fault and frankly it’s kind of amazing that none of his character’s jokes work. Not even one by accident. You’d think they’d stumble onto something funny. Instead it’s just one lead balloon after another.

And in the grand scheme of the movie he’s hardly a problem. The movie’s biggest sin is that it’s just boring. And Godzilla and Kong don’t meet up until 90 minutes in.

One thing I liked about the movie is how much destruction/people are killed simply by Godzilla traveling from once place to another. Godzilla using the Coliseum as a bed is a cute idea. If he’s got someplace to be get the fuck out of his way and hope you have that monster insurance.

D+

I thought it was boring too. Nothing awful but it's just not that exciting and the buildup to have Godzilla and Kong "work together" isn't that well done considering Godzilla hardly had a storyline.

Visually some scenes are stunning, while others are lit in an oddly unappealing and grey style. Saving money on special effects I guess?

Luckily most of the movie focuses on the monsters, as the human characters are dull as ever in this installment of this franchise.

This is about as bad as can be, there are some nice visuals and I liked Dan Stevens in this, but other than that it's so dull and boring. The film is better when the monsters are fighting, as the human stuff is unbearable, and I like Rebecca Hall too, but she just had a terrible script to work with. This film feels entirely made up from scratch, after the previous film warranted a sequel, but what they delivered doesn't show any inspiration for an interesting story. The longer it went one the more I hated sitting through it, it's a bit fun to see some monster action again in the beginning, but it never gets spectacular or dramatic and ends up delivering nothing more than basic cgi destruction.

F

I'll be completely on left field on this one but I'll give this an A-. Yes its cringe in moments, the cutesy wootsy pandering of little Kong, silly set ups of Godzilla charging across the world, I kept laughing at the cities they decided to go to for overly dramatic effect like Cairo and Rio, and the humans really are just an ends to a means to set up different battle scenes but I ended up enjoying it because it at least was 10X more enjoyable than Ghostbusters and gave the audience enough of what they wanted to be a mindless 2 hours. Kong as pure CGI probably had better acting than most of the human cast combined but delivered just enough to work for me.

Hmm, I didn't find it boring, nor did I think the monster mashing were the only good parts, yet the entire movie just felt ... there. Nothing about it felt special like Godzilla vs Kong did. It was just like the Transformers sequels, but with less Bayhem.

My favorite scene in the movie was actually the introduction of Skar King. The way he laughed at Kong's fake tooth, and then forced all the other apes to laugh with him ... It felt like a real King Joffrey thing to do. An unhinged psychotic ruler who loves the remind others that he is better than them. I needed much more of this. If the entire movie had just been Kong's parts I would have loved it. The apes don't talk, or even sign with each other like in the new POTA series, but you always know exactly what they are saying and feeling. Top notch FX for the apes. The other monster designs were pretty basic with everyone either being Godzilla adjace or some type of Dragonair. Godzilla does nothing for most of the movie, but it is pretty funny to just watch him rampaging through cities without any malice, they just happen to be in his way. Also, maybe not the best week to show him destroying a bunch of bridges filled with cars?

So overall, I think the movie is fine and delivered what it promised. I'll give it a 6/10. Yet, I think if they had gone full Primal (the tv show that is) and just made this a Kong story without any stupid humans taking up screen time with their chit chatting then this could have been in the 8-9 range.