"Kong: Skull Island" Review - From the Vaults

 "Viet Kong: Skull Island" (I love that pun too much to give it up now) is a great, fun film made by massive, massive nerds. The opening scene of this movie has an air force pilot duelling a Japanese pilot whilst wearing a jacket with the slogan from "Akira" on it. You will know if you want to watch this movie from what I just told you in that sentence. There's a boat called "Grey Fox", Samuel L Jackson says his "hold onto your butts" line, there are two shots straight out of an FPS video game, and John C Reilly katana-duels a giant lizard. It's that kind of movie.

Rather than merely claiming to be a 'Nam movie, or being "set in the 70s", by just having a half-arsed skin job and the occasional song (I'm looking at you, "X-Men Apocalypse"), this movie embraces both genres wholeheartedly. It's a Vietnam movie which happens to have Kong show up, as opposed to a King Kong movie which happens to have "Creedence" play at one point. They embrace the 'Nam stuff. There's a rocking soundtrack, napalm, choppers, toxic gas grenades, Toby Kebbell writing a letter to his family, Easy E just wanting to go home, the whole works. Shea Whigham even gives a surprisingly good story about war crimes and the futility of war, how mankind searches for an enemy until it drives him to madness. He was one of my favourite characters.

No context Tom Hiddleston. Also: this movie is gorgeous

We follow a bunch of surprisingly fun characters (Dr Dre, Easy E, Hipster Rambo, The Chick from Great Wall, Shea Whigham's "Corporal Zero Shits Given" and a few other pieces of cannon fodder) in three groups: Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson (who gets to be a badass with a flare gun) leading "Team Science", Toby Kebbell finally being given a good movie but being left on his own in the abandoned wreck of a helicopter and trying to decide if he's from the South or not, and Samuel L Jackson leading Walter Sobchak (from his 'Nam days), Easy E, Corporal Zero Shits and others on a Moby Dick-esque odyssey into madness and the horrors of war. It wastes no time in getting us to the island, it gives us character depth as we go along, and pretty good at subverting which of these dudes will and will not make it (though, if you saw the trailer then you know what becomes of Whigham...)

Then there is what we came for:

The Viet Kong.

This ape don't fuck about. Like Phil Tuffnell  on crack, he's hurling choppers into each other, taking napalm like he's Phillip Schofield on a night out, beating aforementioned lizards round the skull with rocks and generally being a badass.

It helps that this movie is gorgeously shot, there are so many frames which look like watercolour paintings, and that we can actually see the fight sequences.

How this isn't a 15 is some kind of miracle. We see men burned with napalm, half-digested skulls, John C Reilly with a beard; this is great!

Also, it's refreshing to see Jackson getting given good roles again, he's unhinged and intense in this. He needs to play the bad guy more often. 

Yes, one or two of the references are a little on the nose (King Kong becoming ensnared in chains, "Conrad" and "Marlowe" being the author and lead of "Heart of Darkness") but it's a fun, fun movie which embraces all that makes Kong and its cast great.

Plus, awesome soundtrack.