It was a strange old time when the creature feature mash-up Godzilla vs Kong was released, the first major blockbuster in cinemas since Covid shuttered them all a year prior. Expectations were low, thanks to how rotten the last two Godzilla films had been, but thirst for something, anything, truly escapist was high and the big screen equivalent of a kid smashing his toys together became an unlikely saviour, both commercially and critically.
Three years later with normality resuming, there’s arguably less audience demand for another instalment, although the industry could definitely do with another monster hit, the strikes leaving the first few months of 2024 a little weakened. There’s enough easily marketable simplicity to Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire that it should become a swift global hit (the film is tracking to make $135m worldwide in its opening weekend) but, especially in the shadow of the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, there will be predictably diminishing returns for those who venture out. It’s a still fun yet far sloppier outing, a second round that’s less of a win for us and more of a draw.
We start out with a truce of sorts. Godzilla remains king, and protector, of the regular world, fighting off creatures of the week when they surface while Kong stays down in the Hollow Earth, the magical other space discovered in the previous film. But their time out is coming to an end, spurred by some dental issues for poor Kong whose infected tooth, and maybe sad sack loneliness too, thrusts him back to humanity. Something greater is also at play, plaguing the dreams of Jia (Kaylee Hottle) who shares a bond with Kong and now lives with her adopted mother (a returning Rebecca Hall), that requires the arch enemies to go from v to x.
What made the last film such a success was the director Adam Wingard’s neat modulation of tone, removing the dank portent of Gareth Edwards’s maddeningly self-serious 2014 offering and bringing the fun that Michael Dougherty’s piss-poor sequel failed to deliver. He’s been wisely brought back for more and it’s refreshing to see him keep things light, his film a brash pop of colour at a time when too many tentpoles of this scale get lost in murk (it’s surely the pinkest Godzilla movie to date). But the script, from a team of three, also trying to keep things breezy, is far less effective. Human time is of course never going to be a priority in these films (Wingard even admitted that they would be of even less importance this time around) but dialogue frequently dips from merely perfunctory to actively dreadful. In trying to align itself with Wingard’s zippiness, the script punishes us with quippy banter so astonishingly, embarrassingly unfunny, we find ourselves pleading with Godzilla to silence them all with one of his feet.
Hall is ever luminous to watch and deserves every bit of her paycheque for playing Mrs Exposition in the last act but one does miss watching her play a real person, a joy that we haven’t had in a while. Dan Stevens and a returning Brian Tyree Henry are both lumped with the comedy and both struggle to make any of it work, which for a portion of the middle stretch, devoid of crashing and smashing, starts to become a problem. But when we return to the action, it’s hard not to feel an itch being scratched, the basic child-like satisfaction of watching giant monsters square off proving to be just as entertaining as we want it to be. Wingard is again able to choreograph and structure large-scale fights with coherence and logic, especially in the eye-popping final act, taking on a four-way battle and never causing us to zone out (many a Marvel director could do with watching and learning).
It’s, obviously, these moments of shock and awe that we come to a Godzilla and Kong movie for but with a two-hour runtime to fill, we start to feel the limitations here more than we should. We’re still supposed to egg the adversaries on for the sake of humanity not secretly hope they might destroy them in the process. If the next chapter ended up being Godzilla Minus People, that wouldn’t be a loss.