‘Kong: Skull Island’ GREAT APE RETURNS

By Jake Coyle

AP Film Writer

Not since Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now” murmured of “the horror” has such a brooding beast lurked deep within a war-ravaged jungle as the King Kong of “Kong: Skull Island.”

Yes, the big ape is back, this time with a rollicking Vietnam War backdrop and the Creedence Clearwater-thumping soundtrack to match. The year is 1973, Nixon is pulling troops out of Vietnam and American explorer Bill Randa (John Goodman) has convinced a senator (Richard Jenkins) to bankroll a quick expedition on the way out to an uncharted South Pacific island where “myth and science meet.”

Unlike Brando’s Colonel Kurtz, we don’t have to wait very long for our errand boys – a cobbled-together team lead by Lieutenant Colonel Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) – to encounter Kong on the exotic island. No sooner has their swarm of helicopters penetrated the island’s permanently stormy perimeter is Kong swatting them away like flies, and the soldiers – fresh off the failed war – yet again find themselves in a gruesome quagmire.

What’s a gorilla got to do with Vietnam? Well, that’s the 800-pound metaphor in the room.

“Kong: Skull Island” is the latest in a long line of reboots going back to the 1933 original. The disappointment of Peter Jackson’s lavish but bloated 2005 attempt pushed producers to explore some other kind of evolution for the chest-pounding primate. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts (whose only previous feature was the indie comedy “The Kings of Summer”) has uprooted the tale from its imperialist origins (beware of what you plunder abroad) and commissioned Kong as a stand-in for the folly of Vietnam.

The shift, which follows a brief World War II preamble, gives “Kong: Skull Island” a strange and surreal energy. An “Apocalypse Now” with monsters is about as bizarre a fit as you’d expect. It is, at least, not the cookie-cutter monster movie it might have been, and Vogt-Roberts – who fills his movie with napalm gas, a chattering Nixon bobble head and fireballs in dense jungles – gleefully plunges into his cartoonish, digitally rendered heart of darkness.

The result is at turns grim and goofy. “Kong: Skull Island,” penned by Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein and Derek Connolly, is never quite sure which it wants to be, but Vogt-Roberts is having too much fun to care.

The team includes a British ex-spy (Tom Hiddleston, who tries to do little beyond handsomely smolder through the film), a self-described “anti-war” photojournalist (Brie Larson, mostly just running with the pack and, later, catching Kong’s eye), and a handful of Vietnam vets under Packard’s command.

Ultimately, the film’s Vietnam setting is less about warfare and history than finding an intoxicating canvas for a pretty old story. “Kong: Skull Island” is more about the monster clashes and, as the post-credit clip (a true commercial) proves, setting up future installments. A wider kaiju-verse is planned.

King Kong, like many before him, has merely been drafted into a war not his choosing.