REVIEW: KING KONG

Come the month of February, when the Oscar nominations are doled out, I'm thinking Vegas will post 3:2 odds on Peter Jackson winning another Best Director nod for King Kong.

Should that happen, I'm thinking there are 3:2 odds that I will commit suicide and sign my note, Disillusioned Film Lover.

I hear the critics hailing, however. Look at the marvelously recreated Depression-era New York City! What a committed performance by Naomi Watts! Look at the giant gorilla, humanized by the filmic miracle of computer graphics! All of which is not up for debate.

But what is apparently up for debate, apparently, at least in Peter Jackson's double-Oscar-winning frontal lobe is the validity of a two-hour love story between a woman and a prehistoric ape. That after all was the aim of the original pre-CGI King Kong. Jackson's post-millenium re-imagining is first a one-hour story of a struggling actress named Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) who might as well have been named Moxie McMoxie, followed by 90-minutes of deleted scenes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, followed by an anti-climactic ending that does very little to tie any of the thematic strands of the first two hours together.

The result is a bloated scourge of a film, an exhausting exercise that includes Jackson's inexplicable taste for portraying aborigines and natives as monstrosities, four dinosaur chases, and a body count that goes mostly unmentioned through the rest of the film. Naomi Watts goes traipsing through miles of jungle avoiding dinosaur jaws on the toughest barefeet in the history of film. And the final 120 minutes of the film contain approximately eight total lines of dialogue.

I'd recommend therapy for Peter Jackson, who can't seem to get over painting his cartoonish fear of marauding, half-naked darkies with spears all over the silver screen in three-hour film after three-hour film. Peter, you fooled me once with orcs. This time, it's clear you have problems.

King Kong is an epic disaster of prehistoric proportions. Don't let Roger Ebert and company persuade you otherwise.