King Kong Reviews
It clocks in at over three hours, but Peter Jackson's remake of the 1933 classic is gripping nonetheless.
It takes a while to get everybody to Skull Island, about 70 minutes, but it's time extremely well-spent.
Kong is a showy, state-of-the-art popcorn movie, faithful to the spirit of the 1933 original but generously adrenalized with the best effects money can buy.
TIME Magazine
Top CriticOur response to the ape's doom, once touched by authentic tragedy, is now marked by relief that this wretchedly excessive movie is finally over.
Kong has heart, and he's willing to show it in a movie made with wit, excitement and moments of visionary beauty.
| Original Score: A-
Jackson took a huge risk with King Kong. But the movie that no film lover wanted him to make is sure to become the blockbuster that everyone is going to want to see, and with good reason.
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| Original Score: 4/4
One hundred eighty-seven minutes of mesmerization, astonishment, thrills, chills, spills, kills and ills, Peter Jackson's big monkey picture show is certainly the best popular entertainment of the year.
The unrelenting computer-animated action suffocates what seems to have been the movie's main purpose, to expand on the Kong-Ann relationship.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Although King Kong is spectacular, its power doesn't reside in its glittering vision of 1933 Manhattan, Jackson's virtuoso flourishes or his computer-generated effects. It's so much simpler: When the gorilla touches the girl, he touches our hearts.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It starts too slowly and suffers from weak dialogue and less-than-epic acting. But as popcorn movies go, this is the year's popcorniest.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Silly, pointless and obscenely overproduced.
Serkis' contribution truly is something we've never seen, an entirely new category of computer-enhanced acting. With not a word of dialogue, he brings to life a close cousin to man with whom we can empathize, yet is never too human-like.
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| Original Score: 4/4
There are some dazzling moments and remarkably clunky ones, a stitched together mixture of old and new, a genre tour that jumps in tone from jaunty comedy to sci-fi horror to laboured social commentary.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Good things do come in big packages. The trick for any filmmaker is to find the small movie within the big one, which is exactly what Peter Jackson does in King Kong.
It's the rare kind of movie that makes too much seem like a good idea.
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| Original Score: 3/4
In a word, Jackson's King Kong is spectacular, awesome, phenomenal and breathtaking. OK, so I can't boil it down to one word.
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.
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| Original Score: 3/5
There's no denying the monumentality of Jackson's achievement, which intermittently lives up to Denham's showbiz credo: 'Magic for the price of a ticket.'
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| Original Score: B+
Too big for its own good, too pure of heart to diminish, brawling, magnificent, heroic and flawed: That's King Kong, and that's King Kong.
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| Original Score: 3/4
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.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's as if Jackson got so excited about his creatures he forgot about his characters.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Peter Jackson has run the original 1933 King Kong through his epic imaginarium and given us the year's most thrilling entertainment. Also its most heartbreaking love story.
| Original Score: 4/4
Jackson spoils us with riches in this film, with one impossible sequence after another; the result is overwhelming but pleasantly so.
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| Original Score: 3/4
King Kong rules, and the big ape's reign is almost problem-free.
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| Original Score: A
While one cannot deny his giant-sized filmmaking gifts or his showmanship, nor can we ignore how thin the air of self-importance feels by the time every last digital effect has been pulled out of the magic bag.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Monstrous. Monumental. Magnificent. Use any term you want, there's no denying the power, genius and spectacle of King Kong, which is certainly the biggest movie of the year and possibly the biggest movie ever made.
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| Original Score: A+
Jackson is filmmaker and entertainer enough to use all the technology at his disposal without losing sight of the sublimely improbable story of beast and beauty, and the exquisitely realized islands they call home.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
You've seen it all before but most assuredly never like this.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A big, bold, gigantor of an action movie that's part head-knocking smackdown, part intimate beauty and the beast and thoroughly entertaining a lot of the time.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Given the excessive length and bombastic F/X, there's too much action and precious little poetry.
With a wizard at the helm, there are times when re-makes can be glorious things.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Peter Jackson's remake is as much a tribute to the old, seat-of-the-pants spirit of early motion pictures as it is an exercise in technological bravura.
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Jackson is a visionary filmmaker who is not only a technical wizard but also a master storyteller.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Most great movies are lucky to have a handful of moments to remember; King Kong has at least two dozen.
| Original Score: 4/4
A travelogue through popular movie genres, it passes from socially conscious drama to comedy, romance, horror, adventure, science-fiction fantasy and doomed love story, cleverly quoting the styles and tropes to which we've become accustomed along the way.
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| Original Score: 4/5
However jawdropping the big effects (there's a dinosaur stampede and some giant white worms who suck men into their squishy maws), they're tenderly elbowed aside by scenes of tender intimacy.
This Kong is high-powered entertainment, but Jackson pushes too hard and loses momentum over the more than three hours of the movie.
This is a great thrill ride with the occasionally beautiful moment, as when Kong and Ann admire a sunset. Pay no attention to the December 14th release date, I think this is really a classic summer movie.
Here is the jaw-dropping, eye-popping, heart-stopping movie epic we've been waiting for all year.
| Original Score: 4/4
The movie seals Jackson's reputation: He's the most gifted big-picture artist working today, a master of epics from a human-eye view who excels at employing 21st-century technological wizardry to suit the needs of ageless, personal storytelling.
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| Original Score: A
What's up on screen is rarely short of staggering.
The $200 million-plus spectacle is funny when it wants to be, exhilarating when it needs to be and a sentimental triumph at the end.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Peter Jackson's King Kong is the most thrilling, soulful monster picture ever made. At last, it can be said without irony -- I laughed, I cried.
This is spectacle filmmaking at its best, where a director is in tune with the story's underlying emotions and his own boyish love for adventure fantasy.
