“It’s so bad, it’s good!”
I’ve said that a bunch of times in my life and yet I now feel that it’s a phrase that I’ve been mis-using all my life.
Godzilla vs Kong is, put simply, a movie that had absolutely no business being made. Sure, there’s the “monster” franchise. We’ve had a Godzilla movie, we’ve had Kong movies. All of these are, frankly, ridiculous. So of course, in true ‘Avengers’ style, the two had to come together at some point. This is that moment.
The plot, for what it’s worth, was clearly written by a twelve-year-old. It’s truly mind-bending to even think about how simple, formulaic and predictable this movie is. The basic premise is:
- Kong’s held in captivity and wants to go “home”
- Godzilla attacks a facility in Miami for “no apparent reason”
- Kong is released to take on Godzilla
- Battle
- Turns out Godzilla was reacting to the big bad making their own Godzilla
- Kong is taken to the inner Earth…or “home”
- Godzilla turns up in Hong Kong to take out Mecha-Godzilla
- Kong magically travels many thousands of miles in no time to take on Godzilla
- They team up to take on Mecha-Godzilla
- The End
Now, most times when you can reduce a movie to bullet points, you’re taking out so much substance and nuance to a film that you do the film a dis-service. I swear to you this is not one of those cases. That is truly the plotline of the movie.
In order to get through that, you have to suspend disbelief to the point where you truly have to pretty much remove any form of rational thought from your brain. Why are the “Titans” from the inner Earth? What the hell is the “gravity inversion” & what causes it? How the heck is there what appears to be sunlight in the middle of the planet? How come Godzilla knows exactly where to drill a hole in order to find Kong? How does Kong then travel what should be literally thousands of miles in seconds to get to Hong Kong? Why does Mecha-Godzilla suddenly want to destroy the planet? OK, I’ll stop there but you get the idea.
So the movie is dreadful………….Except it’s not that simple.
Yes, the plot is weak as a rope made of water. Yes, the acting is so utterly hammed up that the cast look like they’re performing a high school play. Yes, there are so many plot holes that the entire movie is Swiss-cheese. Yet it works.
Once you succeed in turning off your brain, you’re left with a movie that is so action-packed and purely entertaining that it works. I’m not saying it’s even great at that, but it’s not terrible.
I went into watching this movie with incredibly low expectations and they were utterly justified but I still came out the other end happy. This is, by no means, a movie anybody at any time “must see”. But it is a movie that, if you’re stuck on a rainy day with nothing to do, bored out of your mind, you will likely enjoy just for the utter nonsense of it.
