Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire review: A new world can’t make this sequel feel anything but stale

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire is a mouthful of a title. And one that’s surprisingly hard to parse out on its own, especially as it suggests more of a brand collab between those famed cinematic monsters than anything else. Then again, that may well be the best way of understanding what’s happening in this fifth “Monsterverse” flick, directed by Adam Wingard (The Guest). While its predecessor, Wingard’s own Godzilla vs. Kong, announced itself as a thunderous clashing of the titans, this sequel bends over backward to turn those former foes into allies against a threat that (spoiler alert) may well destroy us all.

Since the events of Godzilla Vs. Kong, Monarch has been hard at work monitoring those titular figures: Godzilla now rules and protects the above world, while Kong is presumably cozying up in the Hollow World below. So long as each remains in their respective domain all will be okay. Or so Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall, reprising her role as “walking exposition who is now also a mother” character) tells us at the start of the film. It’s through Dr. Andrews that we learn how intensely Monarch monitors both Kong and Godzilla (and the other awakened titans all over the world)—constant surveillance is just par for the course, here.

It’s through that surveillance that Monarch keeps running into some radio interference that looks surprisingly similar to some drawings Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the sole surviving member of the Iwi tribe, keeps sketching in between dreamlike visions of impending doom. Several exposition-heavy scenes between Dr. Andrews and titan podcaster Bernie Hayes (Brian Tyree Henry, doing his best at livening up the proceedings with his dry humor) end up neatly explaining what’s happening: there’s a distress signal coming from Hollow Earth that may well announce the arrival of the kind of threat we’d seen when other titans first made themselves known to mankind.

That sets in motion a recon mission to Hollow Earth (the world underneath our own) that, wouldn’t you know it, includes Dr. Andrews, Bernie (with camera in tow), Jia (since she can communicate with Kong) and, because this film needed a new cast member, “Trapper” (Dan Stevens), a veterinarian who specializes in titans. Aptly described at one point as a hippie-dippie Ace Ventura, he also has a storied and romantic history with Ilene, of course. And so, with a gruff pilot in tow, our merry band of humans heads to Hollow Earth where the Monarch outpost, they learn, has been destroyed. Not by anything they’ve seen before but… by another ape-looking creature. (All while Godzilla goes on a global rampage tour with stops in Rome, Southern France, Cadiz, and later still Gibraltar and Cairo, where it seems he’s powering up to face what he must sense is a truly powerful threat).

Once the film moves to Hollow Earth and apes (no pun intended) the structure of a trip to Skull Island, where everything is a possible threat (even unassuming trees, as it turns out), you almost wish Godzilla X Kong could sustain such a wry mix of tension and humor. Stevens and Henry do their best at bringing levity to the proceedings but at every turn, the script (by Terry Rossio, Simon Barrett, and Jeremy Slater) keeps weighing itself down with increasingly complicated forays into a long-lost empire (that may explain the connection with Jia), a long-ago vanquished foe (that accounts for the Monarch outpost destruction), and a prophecy that feels like a flimsy attempt at giving some semblance of coherence to what we’re watching.

All such narrative strands feel decidedly arbitrary. They keep Godzilla X Kong waffling between dialogue-free scenes where the body language of an ape fighting off apes like him (including one the film insists on calling Skar King but which I kept calling Slim Kong in my head throughout) and of a loutish kaiju destroying well-known historical monuments (poor Rome!) are ground to a halt whenever Wingard requires Dr. Andrews to explain the latest plot twist in this needlessly complicated (and yet wildly simplistic) tale. By the time the final confrontation between various CG characters comes to a head, you’ll have been treated to a lost civilization aching to stay alive, an ape colony ruled by a fearsome villain, many a scene featuring a “mini Kong” who goes from foe to ally, and, improbably, a moment that no ’90s kid who grew up watching Nickelodeon will mistake for anything else than Kong getting slimed.

Tonally, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire has cornered itself: the self-serious, humanely-driven kaiju story Gareth Edwards first developed with Godzilla (2014) was always going to be an odd fit to the more winkingly playful Kong: Skull Island (2017). If the clashing of these two films (and monsters) made for a somewhat enjoyable ride last time around, continuing to stitch together their mythology and their sensibility has resulted in a film that’s laughably absurd at times (Godzilla naps in the Colosseum after a day of destroying Rome! Kong suffers from a toothache and needs a canine extracted!) and yet wants to carry alongside it a probing message about lost empires, family belonging, and (in a bit of plot engineering that falls by the wayside completely) the moral need to avoid any U.S. government interference in the soulful and very important work done by Monarch.

As a collab, Godzilla x Kong arguably accomplishes its goals. No matter how much this film wants to flesh out the titan and Skull Island mythologies, you come to this place for convincing enough (and sometimes quite beautifully orchestrated) CG battles between its titular stars. In that sense, Wingard’s film delivers. There’s a zero-gravity fight toward the end of the film that, visually, at least, feels inventive enough to set it apart from what previous Monsterverse entries have offered. But so many of those fights—which flirt and yet never commit to the camp adjacent world they would seem to belong to—feel tired; there’s little that’s new here—whether such clashes are taking place amid the Egyptian pyramids, the lush greenery of Hollow Earth, or the beautiful beaches in Rio. This is a well-rebooted brand grasping at straws at staying relevant, perhaps no different than a kid who keeps replaying the same fights between its toys and action figures over and over again. It may well be plenty for a fun enough ride at the theaters, but ultimately this is an exhausting trip into this increasingly unwieldy franchise.

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire arrives in theaters on March 29, 2024