Splatter: on FILM

What do you expect? It’s King Kong. Huge hairy beast destroys all in his path save the lone girl love interest. Kong, we know, has a heart and a weakness for blondes. So is he truly the monster? As with all good monster flicks, there is always a bigger problem and you’re “gonna need a bigger boat.”If your expectations mirror mine, they will be more than met with twice the explosions and ten times the classic Samuel L. one-liners (including his iconic JP “Hold onto your butts”). Amazing.Brie Larson is a gem, as always. Believable, determined photojournalist with a bleeding heart to let photos end wars, she bravely tracks into the unknown jungle island with the baby-faced band of troops just leaving Vietnam. What few of them realize is that their mission is skewed from the start, and now they need two men to help them escape: Tom Hiddleston, rugged, cut-jawed, tracker-for-hire and quirky, marooned WWII pilot John C. Reilly.The cast is lovely. Sweet Thomas Mann (from last year’s Me & Earl & the Dying Girl) adds to this outstanding gang of hopefuls. Believe it or not, I’d watch it again just to hang out with these people. They chose a cast of people I’d want to have dinner with. They are all delightful, even though, yes, many get squashed by a Kong foot or skewered by a giant spider leg. The sequence in the Kong graveyard is so beautifully filmed it’s worth the price of admission.It’s fun. The pace works. The cast works. The film feels comprised of thousands of hero shots, mostly of Kong himself, the true hero of his film.