King Kong Reviews

Too much of not enough.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Fails to match the simple, handmade artistry of the original

Full Review

By stretching everything out to Epic length, Jackson has taken on well more than his source material -- reproduced with fervent love -- can support.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Fitfully extraordinary yet largely lackluster.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

This lackluster cure for insomnia might have been more palatable without so many distracting digressions and pared down to a manageable ninety minutes or so. Zzzz... Zzzz... Zzzz...

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4

In the process of modernizing Kong, Jackson has made his film a mix of ungodly spectacle and masturbatory overkill.

Full Review | Original Score: D+

To borrow from an old joke, Peter Jackson's King Kong is thirty minutes of spectacular entertainment spread out over a three hour movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Overlong by half, hedonistically animated and decadently self-indulgent King Kong is beastly to be sure, but there is little beauty here.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10

three big hours of monkey business... overwrought and self-indulgent to a fault

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

'Twas overkill killed the beast.

Full Review | Original Score: C

Jackson's love and nostalgia for his beast is what kills the movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Peter Jackson may have lost weight, but he hasn't lost his gluttony. There is no excuse for the 3 hour and 7 minute running time of King Kong. Hollywood needs an enema, and Peter Jackson needs an editor.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

CGI spectacle that smacks of self-importance and showbiz hustle P.T. Barnum style.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Given the excessive length and bombastic F/X, there's too much action and precious little poetry.

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It's as if Jackson got so excited about his creatures he forgot about his characters.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Like Black's craven filmmaker, Jackson swells into a madman impresario, so hell-bent on topping himself that he doesn't know when to cut and run.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

At three hours, Jackson's Kong is too bloated and digressive to match the pure adrenaline of the first film, perhaps the finest B-movie ever made.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

The unrelenting computer-animated action suffocates what seems to have been the movie's main purpose, to expand on the Kong-Ann relationship.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4

Kong's eye-popping array of cinematic tricks reflects the filmmaking philosophy of a director for whom anything worth doing is worth overdoing, then doing to death.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

[It's] a special-effects extravaganza that pummels us senseless. Something's gone wrong if our strongest emotional response to Kong's conclusion is relief.

| Original Score: C+

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