The Kong Who Would Be King: KONG: SKULL ISLAND

At least the latest big-budget creature feature, Kong: Skull Island, works where it really counts: the creatures. It presents an island full of creepy crawlies and monster mashes, not merely the expected ginormous ape, but also: towering water buffalo, massive birds, a gargantuan octopus, and a family of creepy skull-faced lizards so humungous they’d leave even the biggest, meanest dinosaur trembling in their shadows. It may not have much in the way of character or personality, either for its actors to inhabit or for its filmmaking to display – it’s all borrowed from other, better, inspirations and thinned out in the process – but the effects department earned its budget and then some. It may have the colorful aesthetic gloss of an expensive A-level picture, but its heart has more in common with the junky B-movie big monkey Kong rip-offs than the lean and mean 1933 original or the epic melancholy of Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake.

Moving at an impossibly rushed clip – though to what end I don’t know, as there’s not much worth hurrying to that taking time to settle into the dread and fear couldn’t improve – the movie hurtles a large cast onto Skull Island. We’re told it is hidden behind a perpetual storm system, and the film is set in an analog 1973, a double explanation as to how the place has remained uncharted. The expedition helicopters over and almost immediately runs into the main attraction. This movie’s Kong is the size of a skyscraper. If he tried to climb the Empire State Building he’d crush it in a single stomp. (But though his enormity has grown, his personality, and the movie, is second rate to earlier Kings.) He quickly thrashes the interlopers, killing all the extras and leaving the Movie Stars to fend for themselves amongst the jungle beasties. Would that any of them be allowed a sliver of personality beyond audience recognition from previous roles. It’s hard to be dazzled by the destruction when Samuel L. Jackson’s stubborn colonel, John Goodman’s crackpot explorer, Tom Hiddleston’s tracker, and Brie Larson’s photographer, are merely there to pose in the pulp. They’re asked to sell unsellable empty roles, and thus hard to care about when juxtaposed with the senseless noise around them.

Also along for the ride are Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbel, Jiang Tian, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Thomas Mann, and John Ortiz. It’s a huge cast with little to do. What the film lacks in character in makes up in characters, splitting them up, sending them hither and thither across Skull Island, wandering aimlessly into one creature’s den after the next. When they encounter, say, a gargantuan log with eyes, their first instinct is to open fire. There’s no curiosity or awe here, only bloodlust. This extends to the lack of gravity given to the imagery, monsters treated as frivolous animal foes instead of creatures in their own right. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts, plucked from Sundance to helm this Hollywood undertaking, loves watching the tech and the explosions and the bloodshed – and he likes seeing Kong the MMA brawler – but gives it none of the patient dazzlement of Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla. There is only the grubby beauty of the jungle landscapes – crudely standing in for Vietnam in the cinematic equivalent of mumbling your way through a muddled metaphor – and the drooling beasties as ILM dumps out their design book into the wilds of the frame.

Still, no matter how inane and inert the film often is, it crackles to life when John C. Reilly stumbles into the picture as a WWII pilot lost on the island for decades. He plays up the disorientation and madness of his character with unpredictable Brule-like spasms of awkward intensity and exasperation. He brags about his Kong lore, but is quick to admit he’s never actually spoken it aloud before. Single-handedly stealing the movie out from under the most talented cast assembled for something so frivolous in a long time (since, what, National Treasure: Book of Secrets or something?), Reilly offers up personality to spare. He upstages Kong, no mean feat when the sometimes-gentle giant’s every step rattles the subwoofers (except, of course, for the scene where he is suddenly in front of Larson in an open field despite what should’ve been an inescapably long, loud walk). The rest of the movie is just empty 70’s dress up run through a copycat Kaiju playbook, with whack-a-mole monsters and crudely manipulated archetypes. We’re supposed to thrill to the fussy visual touches around the edges – a crashing helicopter from the point of view of a bobble head on the dashboard; explosions seen reflected in sunglasses; a giant octopus slurped up like Kong-sized noodle soup – and forget we’re watching much less than meets the eye.

Cat People: KEANU

It warms the heart that the stars, creators, and writers behind a smart cable sketch show can get a major studio to bankroll a movie that’s both a loving riff on a recent cult favorite Keanu Reeves actioner and a feature-length joke about code-switching. (That’s when people move between two or more types of speech depending on the context or situation.) You don’t see a movie like that every day. The problem with Keanu, the action comedy concocted by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele of Comedy Central’s terrific, recently departed Key and Peele, is that beyond those two admittedly funny ideas, there’s not much else going on. Sure, it’s amusing to watch these guys bring their show’s comic sensibilities to the big screen, but the results play like a good suggestion for a long sketch stretched thin across 98 minutes.

Clearly taking as its inspiration John Wick, Reeves’ fun ex-hitman-gets-revenge-on-the-mobsters-who-killed-his-puppy movie, Keanu starts with a dopey unambitious stoner (Peele) finding an absolutely adorable kitten on his doorstep. This helps him get over his recent breakup by bringing new meaning to his life. The cat is named Keanu, and he really brings the guy’s life together. Too bad, then, that a drug dealing gang leader (Method Man) kidnaps the little pet in a case of mistaken identity. Setting aside all rational reasons to not get involved, Peele recruits the help of his straight-laced suburbanite cousin (Key) to infiltrate the gang and get the cat back. This being a light and silly comic thriller, of course the crowd of toughs down at the 17th street strip club (including Tiffany Haddish and Jason Mitchell) mistakes the two dweebs for notorious hitmen and begs them to go along on a delivery. They’ll trade them the cat for their help. And, come on, isn’t he cute enough to excuse the danger?

Brilliantly adaptable performers, Key and Peele, shifting between their usual speech – jokingly described as sounding like “Richard Pryor’s impersonation of a white guy” – to deeper timbres and slangy talk, and moving between stiff ambling and loose swagger in their steps, portray the fish-out-of-water elements terrifically. It’s funny to see Key cooing to his wife (Nia Long) on the phone before spotting a dealer in his peripheral vision and switching smoothly to a gruff patter. The movie returns to this joke again and again, getting a smirk or a smile out of two meek guys bouncing between different behaviors, acting the part to convince the tough guys they belong. Other jokes involve: threats of danger and/or sudden bursts of violence startling our leads, an adorable cat pawing or meowing, and a running joke involving the music of George Michael. (At first Key is teased for liking him, but later turns the gang into big fans.) As the stakes get higher, drugs are passed around, people are bloodily killed, and it’s clear our leads are going to be lucky to get out alive, let alone with Keanu in tow.

This is yet another R-rated comedy about guys who need to learn to take responsibility for themselves and do so by following their ids and getting in over their heads. What’s smart is allowing this to be the rare man-child rampage with actual, sensible consequences. The screenplay by Peele and Alex Rubens, a writer on Key and Peele, never shies away from the danger involved, never forgetting life and death matters at hand. When a dumb pot dealer (Will Forte) is kidnapped, it’s treated as ominous. When two lumbering heavies pull out gleaming torture implements, it’s a little scary. When a drug deal with a Hollywood star (a fun cameo) goes south, it’s shocking. This stomps out some of the laughs, but at least it really commits to how wrong-headed its characters are, up to and including the enjoyable reversal in its climactic moments. Where others action comedies would shrug off its heroes crimes, this one realizes there’s no Get Out of Jail Free card.

So it has its moments. But as Keanu moves along, there’s no sense of build or variation to any of the humor. It opens with its silly juxtapositions and amusing concept and doesn’t take them anywhere. When not repeating similar beats – one of the guys expresses surprise, drops character, then stumblingly improvises a recovery; a gang member reveals surprising tenderness, then quickly toughens back up – the comedy falls back on the sorts of square-on-a-drug-trip and profane sputtering we’ve seen over and over again. Director Peter Atencio, so wonderful at committing to a variety of stock scenarios with specificity and cinematic sweep on Key and Peele, creates a reasonable facsimile of a crime film setting, but within it finds little of interest. The frictions established in the opening half hour are merely reiterated and repeated in the next hour, as characters travel predictable emotional arcs.

There may be a few nice surprises here and there, but the whole feels a little underwritten, the jokes a tad too sparse and the thriller mechanics not involving enough to work on that level alone. It’s amusing, but not as sharp or varied as you’d expect from comedians who spent five seasons of TV constructing smart commentary by skirting potentially insulting or stereotypical material and finding sideways approaches to unexpected punchlines. Their movie theater talkers, auctioned slaves, inner city substitute, and football player sketches are perfect examples of finding funny observations beyond the cheap, obvious, and offensive places where lesser talents would’ve been happy to stop. Keanu is a good idea that makes for a passable diversion, yet it’s considerably less interesting, and gets fewer laughs, than almost anything they did on their show. But, man, that’s one cute cat.

West Coast Story: STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

It never fails to amaze me how all musicians’ biopics eventually turn into the same movie. Once they get past the specifics of where and when their particular stars burst into success, and the exciting early flashes of creativity and fame, it’s always contract disputes, fights over attribution and compensation, battles with drugs and/or disease, struggles with jealousies and egos, and finally a reckoning with past mistakes that somehow cements the subjects’ place in pop culture history. It’s one of the movies' most predictable formulas, a cross-promotional opportunity in the form of music business mythologizing. That a wide swath of industry legends, varied in time, place, genre, and character, can be reduced and inflated to weirdly similar tropes is more than a bit tiresome. And yet, the form holds steady and even occasionally jolts to life because 1.) when it works it works, and 2.) it’s so often true.

Take Straight Outta Compton for example, an up-tempo and glossy reenactment of the rise of gangsta rap on the West Coast in the late-80s and early-90s. It blasts to life with capable and exciting rising action, charting the success and decline of the groundbreaking hip-hop group N.W.A. with energy. The guys in the group came of age in Compton neighborhoods rife with poverty, feuding gangs, and constant police brutality. They turned the frustrations and pleasures of their daily lives into raunchy rhymes set to catchy beats, telling the truth of their experience in a way that spoke to others like them, and to a mainstream eager to eat up that authenticity. It’s a common trope for movies like this to say that the music in question was unlike anything heard before. But here we not only see how tremendously exciting N.W.A.’s music was, we get a sense of the times to which it was perfectly positioned to speak.

The screenplay (by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff, with story credits for S. Leigh Savidge and Alan Wenkus) starts strong, digging into the group’s origin story. We first meet the ambitious young men, Ice Cube (played by his son, O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), Dj Yella (Neil Brown Jr.), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) and The D.O.C. (Marlon Yates Jr.), in confrontations with cops who roll up threateningly. In our current climate of police brutality and racist practices, scenes of beatings, intimidations, and incarcerations are all the more electric. The movie opens on a raid, a militarized vehicle blasting open a drug house, the battering ram slamming into one of the occupants as Eazy-E, a low-level dealer, flees. Later, we see Cube, a sensitive poet, menaced by police, and Dre, an aspiring DJ, locked up for little more than throwing a single punch. Soon, they’re putting their creative energies together to cut a record, turbulent social energies feeding their expression.

These early scenes are the best, painting a vivid portrait of life in Compton as a group of charismatic young people hangs on the precipice of stardom. Soon, they’ve met a sleazy manager (Paul Giamatti) who promises riches. They record an album – 1988’s Straight Outta Compton, featuring hits like the galvanic “Fuck tha Police” – and head out on a whirlwind cross-country tour. Huge crowds flock to their concerts, while their music scares pearl-clutching pundits. It comes to a head in a terrific scene set in Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena where a crowd of white cops backstage warns N.W.A. not to play a certain song. Bet you can guess which one. They perform it, of course, and the crowd erupts. So do the cops.

For a while, director F. Gary Gray puts a little extra energy in this based-on-a-true-story form. Maybe it helps that he would’ve been around for some of it, what with his directorial debut being an Ice Cube video in 1993. He’s best known for low comedy (Friday) and slick thrillers (The Negotiator), and here plays to his strengths. With cinematographer Matthew Libatique, the look is sparkling and smooth. He makes scenes of hotel room parties and backstage antics sing with rambling raunchy camaraderie, while clashes with authority figures have a tense edge. There are plenty of interesting moments, compellingly acted, as the guys struggle to reconcile their individual priorities with the group’s dynamics. Cube goes solo, setting off a volley of diss tracks. Dre meets Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor), who is presented in a largely villainous light as he lures him into a new business partnership.

But in moving from their initial high-flying fame to the daily grind of managing relationships with business, the movie loses energy and novelty. Gray and his collaborators embalm recent history for preservation and praise, but not much in the way of narrative or cultural context. After the group hits big then falls apart, the movie becomes less a story and more a selection of biographical details, a collection of scenes in which characters and songs practically step out and get their own annotated introduction. For instance: “Who’s this guy?” one character will say, pointing at a new face. “That’s Snoop,” comes the answer, as Keith Stanfield steps in to play him for a scene and a half, rapping a few recognizable bars. How often can we watch scenes weighted with hindsight, nudging and winking at us to recognize famous lyrics, names, interviews, and catchphrases (“Bye, Felicia” shows up in an awfully belabored sequence)?

The movie starts strong and loses energy the more it becomes a predictable recitation of familiar biopic beats. Instead of digging into the lives of these men as characters, a rough and energized truth is sanded down to fit a commodified varnished version, comfortable and corporate. (Over the end credits, we practically get an ad for Beats by Dre.) Here’s a movie that lives moment by moment in an energetic novel space – the first sprawling rap history period piece – and adds up to a whole lot of unfocused familiar motions, reducing complicated real people into shiny pop symbols.