The Telegraph
Godzilla vs Kong, review: exactly the loud, trashy mayhem we’ve been missing this year
Dir: Adam Wingard. Cast: Rebecca Hall, Alexander Skarsgård, Kaylee Hottle, Brian Tyree Henry, Millie Bobby Brown, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, Shun Oguri, Eiza Gonzalez. 12A cert, 113 mins Forget the Oscar and Bafta contenders. No film has made me ache more for the reopening of cinemas in May than this trashily sublime, visual-effects-driven blare-a-thon, in which a king-sized gorilla and a radioactive lizard settle their differences over the smoking remains of a city or two. For those of us who have spent much of the last 13 months pining for a bit of big-screen spectacle, this latest instalment in Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse franchise arrives like a naughty WhatsApp message from an old flame. Remember this?, it purrs, while coyly flattening a skyscraper, or sending a spaceship through a rainbow-coloured wormhole. Not much longer to wait now, it adds, with a winking, kiss-blowing emoji. It’s hard while watching Godzilla vs Kong not to wish that you were seeing it projected in towering proportions (in countries where cinemas are currently open, including China, the film has already taken £90 million). But on a large enough television, it still delivers the kind of base, brain-dazing pleasures that the average Best Screenplay contender couldn’t hope to match. As the fourth instalment in an ongoing series, there is no standing or stomping on ceremony here: no fleeting, partial glimpses of the film’s title characters before jumbo-scale mayhem ensues. The film opens on Kong himself, who is trying to break free from a Truman Show-style compound, and then brings us up to speed with his scaly rival, who’s laying waste to the Florida coast. In the previous MonsterVerse instalments, Godzilla was something of a heroic figure, fending off an assortment of giant winged and clawed threats. But this latest unprompted attack signals an apparent shift in loyalties, so an operation gets underway to bring the creature to heel. This is masterminded by Walter Simmons (Demián Bichir), the chief executive of a deeply sinister cybernetics corporation, and it involves a Jules Verne-like voyage to a hidden subterranean realm, where lies the only power source on the planet capable of subduing the beast. The expedition is led by geologist Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgård), but its whopping sherpa is Kong himself – coaxed into service by Rebecca Hall’s doe-eyed primatologist and her deaf adopted daughter (Kaylee Hottle), who has managed to teach the big lug some basic sign-language.
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