Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire review – big, goofy fun

A small sense of spatial awareness and basic understanding of remedial physics gets director Adam Wingard a long way in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, a stratospherically goofy action beat-em-up which ends up playing to its primal, calorific strengths rather than opting for anything deeper and tastier.

We’re in “Hollow Earth”, a leafy, soft-focus subterranean expanse which is, apparently, even more hollow than “actual Earth”. Axe-wielding emo titan, King Kong, is out and about taking care of his daily chores (fending off green-blooded wildebeests; taking a shower; looking sad because he’s so lonely, etc) when a sinkhole transports him down to another leafy expanse populated by violent enslaved monkeys, all overseen by the malevolent Scar King.

Now, the Scar King wants nothing more than to break free of this picturesque if dismally-dull cavern and wreak havoc up top and do what these titan-types love to do: smash up depopulated prefab condominium blocks and let out ultrasonic yells. And he got a special bejewelled spinal column snake whip to fend off any foes.

Unlucky for him, Godzilla is now acting as global peacekeeper topside, taking nap time in Rome’s coliseum while also circumnavigating the globe to ingest nuclear energy in the same way a body builder would bang steroids. Godzilla genuinely does not give a f*** in his random perambulations, and there are loads of shots of perspiring desk jockeys yelling, “What the hell is he doing?!!” and variations thereof.

All of which is to say, circumstances lead to a mighty destructo-porn showdown in an iconic and beloved resort city that the film’s makers apparently believe audiences want to see transformed into smoking rubble. And they’re half-right. In these films, the human characters are always going to play second fiddle to the computer-generated goliaths, and so it is here with Rebecca Hall’s crop-haired scientist doing little more than gamely spouting exposition. Wingard regular Dan Stevens is bussed in as a wacky rock ‘n’ roll vet, the kind of guy you’d strenuously avoid at a cocktail party, while Brian Tyree Henry plays an oversharing and flamboyant podcast conspiracist who’s bundled along for the ride.

There’s a lot that is naff and half-baked in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire; elements that its makers feel they need to dutifully tick off before they’re allowed to indulge in the good stuff. And the first 40-or-so minutes of the film are so boilerplate that you’re left to wonder if Windard et al have opted for some meta deconstructionist mode, where everything looks and feels like its own Saturday Night Live parody.

Yet when it settles in and you can see that all narrative due diligence is done, things are allowed to flex out a bit more and there are a few nice battles and some nifty design aspects tossed in. Where this film excels is in the basics – it doesn’t take any risks and just choses to do the simple things well. Which sounds like the faintest of faint praise, but the reality is, so many effects blockbusters attempt to run before they can walk (mentioning no names), and at least Wingard has the humble intent of a filmmaker who wants to make something simple, coherent and fun. And those are laudable aims these days.

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