Carrying around all that extra monkey weight can sometimes lead to an uncomfortable situation.

Longtime fans of the strip will recognize the gag I’ve busted out of retirement for today’s comic. Can you believe the last time I used it was July, 2003? Seems like it’s been with us forever.

Cami and I were finally able to get our holiday shopping set aside and went to see King Kong  on Saturday. We were really surprised that there weren’t more people in the theater. We went to the 7:00 show. We thought for sure it would be packed. Ended up that maybe a third of the theater was full.

Apparently this is happening in a lot of theaters across the country. Last Wednesday’s $10 million take wasn’t a fluke. It really was an indicator of audience interest in this picture. Instead of the film earning in the $80 – 90 million range over the first five days (an a minimum of $60 million over the weekend) it underperformed and took in a hair over $50 million.

It’ll be interesting to see how the film does over the Christmas holiday. Maybe families are waiting until they have more free time to show up en masse. Maybe it was a marketing misstep on the part of Universal to release the film the week before Christmas because now – as I’m hearing it – audience reaction has been mixed. It’s having trouble living up to the hype and all those glowing reviews.

What was my take on the film? I’m not going to martyr myself and say I hated it, but I will admit there were things about the movie that I didn’t enjoy. I mean, things about the movie that flat-out disgusted me.

Okay, I’m gonna dive into this a little now. So if you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want it ruined, be warned…

HERE BE SPOILERS!

The first act of the movie is ponderously slow. EXCRUTIATINGLY slow. You could argue that they’re setting up the exposition, and that’s fine. But there was easily 20 minutes of footage here that could have been tossed out to tighten up the running time. The relationship between the First Mate and the young sailor, for example. They toss that in there to add emotional weight to one of the later scenes on Skull Island. Except when that scene finally rolls around, it doesn’t deliver because we never cared about these characters in the first place.

The best part of the movie hands down is the second act on Skull Island. It looks as foreboding as it sounds and the place is totally out of control. The half-possessed natives on the island were truly terrifying. The anguished faces carved into all of the rocks was a brilliant touch.

Kong himself was a marvel to behold. Andy Serkis’ motion-captured performance as the great ape was totally naturalistic and I bought into it. I think it’s safe to say that those blokes in the Weta Workshop in New Zealand are giving ILM a SERIOUS run for their money when it comes to effects work. All the little touches to the scars on Kong’s face to the debris in his fur felt totally right. I believed in him as a character.

The fight between Kong and the two Tyrannasaurus Rex is worth the price of admission alone. It’s choreographed brilliantly and is the exact turning point in the movie where you start to root for the monster as he shows his protective instinct toward Naomi Watts’ Ann Darrow. When Kong cracks open the jaw of the dinosaur, twists his neck around then stands triumphantly over the giant leathery corpse – you half expect a ring announcer to step out, microphone in hand and shout "WINNAH! KONG!"

That said, as good as the dinosaur fight is… really, as good as all the giant critter footage is – you watch it and get the sense that things just keep unspooling with no end. Some of these chase sequences and fights go on FOREVER. Watching them, you’re not really bored, but you wonder when it’s going to end. There are two possible arguments to this. Either Peter Jackson has no sense of control and decided to throw everything up on the screen… OR it’s Jackson’s way of re-enforcing part of the movie’s theme that mankind cannot control nature. When you think you’re on top of things, nature will always find a way to surprise you. Nature always wins. I haven’t figured out which one of the two I believe.

I’ll say this; The scene with all the bugs is probably one of the creepiest, grossest and most uncomfortable I’ve had to sit through all year. I don’t think it’s a bad scene. Watching Andy Serkis (as the ship’s mysterious cook Lumpy!) be consumed by giant earthworms isn’t something you see every day. What made it difficult is that we had to endure it immediately after the rousing Kong/dinosuar battle. You aren’t given a chance to come down from that before Jackson steers you headlong into an entirely different set of extreme emotions. I think this is part of what’s contributing to the "everything but the kitchen sink" feeling you get from the picture.

Watching the movie, you start to notice that there are several long stretches where there is almost no dialogue. I think when Kong and Darrow are up on the high cliff watching the sunset, when Darrow says "Beautiful," it’s the first word uttered in the last 30 minutes. It’s jarring. It took me right out of that scene.

There are a lot of little moments that broke the suspension of disbelief for me. Ironically, it wasn’t the fantastic over-sized creatures that I found distracting. I thought they were the most realistic things in the movie. Instead, it was the emotional stuff that felt fabricated to me.

I had a hard time believing that Adrien Brody’s screenwriter character Jack Driscoll could care so deeply about Darrow after only having kissed her once. We don’t really see any deep bond between the two. Just some awkward courtship. Now suddenly he’s willing to risk life and limb – being EATEN – to save this stranger? Maybe he’s answering to some more grandiose sense of chivalry that existed in the 1930’s, but I’m not buying it. Nor am I willing to buy that so many of the ship’s crew would also risk so much. As she’s written, Darrow doesn’t seem like anything special. If anything, she comes off a little dumb. What’s worth rescuing? The answer is they HAVE to because the script says they do.

I don’t believe for a minute that Driscoll could switch gears from big city screenwriter to balls-out action hero like he did. Kicking Velocoraptors in the face, firing machine guns. Nope. Sorry. Not plausable. I also didn’t believe that the actor character played by Kyle Chander could retreat in cowardace, only to return at the last possible minute as the leader of a rescue party, swinging on vines and shooting up the place like Rambo. Perhaps if Jackson had framed these heroics within the context that inside this fantastic situation, these individuals dug deep to uncover fantastic abilities and resources within themselves – but I didn’t feel like this was established.

Additionally, Darrow’s near-romantic relationship with Kong also felt forced. I can understand that they have this bond because she provides an emotional connection for him where there has been none for ages (Kong appears to be the last of his kind). For Darrow, Kong provides protection against and uncertain and dangerous environment. But once the action moves back to New York, that Darrow someone how instinctively knows to go to Kong when things go haywire seemed a little convienient. Also, that whole scene with them spinning around on the frozen lake like it was some kind of first date just felt weird.

Do you have any idea how cold it would have to be to freeze the ice to the point where it was thick enough to support the weight of a 25 foot tall gorilla? Meanwhile, Darrow in her little silk dress seems as comfortable as can be. Watching her in that costume – especially atop the Empire State Building where winds are probably, y’know… about 30 miles an hour – I kept thinking "Isn’t she cold?" Then I became annoyed. "WHY ISN’T SHE COLD?!"

I think the thing that really tweaked me about the movie and left me with a bitter taste in my mouth was the delivery of that last, classic line. "Oh no. It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast." They gave that line to Jack Black’s dispicable Carl Denham. The line is supposed to reflect that Kong wasn’t really a monster. It’s we, the humans who are the savages. But by giving the line to Darrow, it comes off less as commentary on humanity’s potential for cruelty and more like he’s trying to pawn off his responsibilty for capturing Kong and putting him display to a gawking public on Darrow. The act would be within character for Denham, but it kind of spits on the idea of the source material.

END SPOILERS

Overall, I thought the movie was good. I was wrapped up in a lot of the action seqeunces and certainly fell for the "WOW!" factor of it. But the emotional stuff really bugged the crap out of me. Maybe I’m off base. Cami thought that was the best part of the movie. She was totally captivated by Darrow’s relationship with Kong. I don’t know. Maybe I missed something.

If you have thoughts about King Kong or want to leave your own review, please check out our User Movie Review Database. You can leave your thoughts on nearly every movie Theater Hopper has discussed in the last three and a half years. We’re adding new movies all the time. Here’s the link to King Kong’s specific listing.

Review away!