King Kong

OK, so it was always going to be very difficult to get anywhere near the 1933 version so I suppose the question here is - why bother? Well, they did - and what we have here is a bit of a shocker. The character names have been changed and the plot line updated to suggest this is more about oil exploration than beastie hunting, but thereafter the story is the same as the glamorous "Dwan" (Jessica Lange) becomes the apple of the eye of our eponymous giant ape. Taken deep into his jungle lair, the pair are pursued by Jeff Bridges ("Prescott") and Charles Grodin ("Wilson") who face all sorts of perils as they try to rescue the damsel in distress. The damsel, meantime, is beginning to fall for her over-sized beau and maybe she didn't actually want rescuing? We, on the other hand, certainly do. This takes far too long to get going and once it does, it offers us a very pedestrian interpretation of one of the most iconic love stories in cinema history with acting that is as about as wooden as it gets. The colour photography is first rate, but that also serves to rob the film of much of it's soul. This has a made-for-television look to it that is entirely devoid of any sense of menace or emotion. Lange screams like the best of them at the beginning, but there is nothing of the vulnerable about her characterisation. It doesn't help that the supporting cast are little better than a collection of daytime C-listers delivering a dialogue that really needed quite a bit more work had it hoped to engage us for 2¼ hours. Just because the visual effects made this possible doesn't mean that it should have been made. Judge for yourself, but I doubt you will find it either entertaining nor a patch on the original.