VERDICT: One of the better American Godzilla movies delivers the giant-monster-fighting goods, even if waiting for the grand finale occasionally feels like a chore.
For the cost of about ten minutes of Warner Bros. and Legendary’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Japanese filmmakers created Godzilla Minus One, an acclaimed global hit, and Oscar winner that has more heart and brains than all American kaiju movies combined. Still, if Hollywood insists on continuing its separate monsterverse, it could do worse than GxK, a film where giant beasts wallop the tar out of each other with thrilling efficacy.
However, Getting to those battles means enduring scenes where a cadre of overqualified actors (led by Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry) stare at screens and seismic graphs while yelling nonsense-science exposition at each other. Hall recently made a powerful directorial debut with Passing, but she’s keeping one foot firmly planted in her one-for-them day job; she and Kaylee Hottle do what they can to give this movie something resembling a heartbeat.
Hottle plays Jia, a young girl who is, along with Kong, the last survivor of Skull Island. She and the big ape remain psychically linked, and when an unknown distress signal emerges from Hollow Earth, the subterranean area that’s currently Kong’s literal stomping grounds, SOS distresses both of them.
Jia’s adopted mother Ilene (Hall) is a higher-up at Monarch — the secretive corporation lurking behind the scenes of this entire series of giant-monster movies — but after getting nowhere with her team of qualified scientists, she turns to podcaster and conspiracy theorist Bernie (Henry) for suggestions on dealing with the situation.
Ilene eventually puts together a team to go to Hollow Earth, including Bernie, Jia, and irritatingly self-assured “rebel” veterinarian Trapper (Dan Stevens). (The film’s one excuse for its many schlocky and on-the-nose needle drops is that Trapper brought the boom box. He doesn’t do finger-guns in GxK, but he’s the kind of guy who would do finger-guns.)
Meanwhile, a sinkhole opens up in Hollow Earth, and as Kong explores what’s at the bottom, he runs into what might be other creatures of his kind, including scene-stealing youngster Suko. (Their meet-cute involves a hilarious fight scene in which Kong uses the smaller ape as a weapon against larger apes.) And while all this is going down at the center of the Earth, Godzilla is finding global power sources — from nuclear power plants to other kaiju — to charge himself up for an impending battle that will bring all of these plot threads together.
Director Adam Wingard and his trio of screenwriters stage the kind of monster mayhem that doesn’t, for even a moment, consider the human casualties involved. The Monarch spin-off TV series focuses on characters traumatized by Godzilla’s appearance in San Francisco (in 2014’s Godzilla), but in GxK, kaiju lay waste to entire city blocks of Rome and several car-choked overpasses in Rio de Janeiro without the filmmakers batting an eye.
It’s worth noting, however, that Wingard’s direction here feels far more assured than it did in 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, a film that treated the Japanese superstar like an afterthought. Kong remains front and center this time, but Godzilla gets much more to do, even if what he’s doing doesn’t seem to make much sense until the film’s thrilling final act. For all its flaws, GxK is second only to the underappreciated Godzilla: King of the Monsters among the Warner/Legendary reboot of these venerable characters.
Editor Josh Schaeffer (65) succeeds in keeping the battle sequences agile and exciting, although even his cutting skills can do only so much with the labored banter between the human characters. Unlike many of the previous American kaiju movies, GxK wisely intersperses the monster action throughout; the movie still saves its best melees for the last 20 minutes or so, but at least it enlivens the wait involved to get there.
Longtime fans worried that the title Godzilla x Kong implies a friendly collaboration — as though the two of them had co-designed a line for H&M — can rest assured that the famously quarrelsome duo reach, at best, a situational détente as they tackle their joint nemeses. But with all the new characters being introduced here, including a kaiju favorite, GxK both lays the groundwork for more sequels and makes the possibility of such sequels seem welcome.
