So a pattern I’ve noticed in action movie franchises — John Wick, Fast and Furious, and the Monsterverse here — is that the franchise has three phases:

  1. Grounded. The early movies are relatively — relatively! — realistic and down to Earth. This is the gang boosting DVD players in the Fast & Furious movies. It’s John Wick being mad about his dog in the first movie. It’s the early Monsterverse movies (which yes, have giant monsters, but given that were relatively tame).

  2. The turn to the fantastic. This is the peak of the franchise, it’s where they open it up and start having fun in ways you wouldn’t have expected. It’s the Fast and Furious crew getting involved in bank heists, it’s John Wick meeting up with an ancient order of assassins, and it’s finding out that there’s a hollow earth in which King Kong will pick up the sceptre of his lost civilization en route to fighting Mechagodzilla in GvK.

  3. Decadent. This is where the franchise has burned through every plausible storyline, and it’s surrendered to nonsensical spectacle. Think about Ludacris riding a car into space, about that last John Wick movie… and about GxK.

This is a movie that mostly takes place in the Hollow Earth, where the human characters exist just to kinda watch stuff happen and I guess to keep it from being a wholly animated film. It piles absurdity on top of absurdity — for instance: there’s a part where the ground crumbles in the Hollow Earth, revealing the Subterranean Realm below. Given that we’re inside the Earth, is this… closer to the surface? Who knows! Who cares! Definitely not the people who wrote this movie.

We know from the title that we’re going to get a Godzilla/Kong team-up, but the movie’s in no hurry to get there; for the first half of the movie, Godzilla is just killing time attacking nuclear reactors to power himself up more, while Kong is dealing with tooth decay and meeting up with a little Diddy Kong, because he needs an adorable sidekick, I guess.

But they do eventually team up to fight an enemy that’s so bland it’s impossible to think they need to. Like, both Godzilla and Kong have taken out more imposing foes than this without any help. Feels like the filmmakers should maybe have spent more time building up the villain to seem more impressive, but oh well.

We do ultimately get some monster fights; awkwardly, they happen on the surface, in major cities, and buildings are getting absolutely destroyed by the block. There are tens of thousands of dead people in the aftermath of these monster battles, and nobody even blinks at it. It’s extremely weird, given how much that’s been a thing since that one Superman movie.

I can’t hate this movie, because it’s delivering what it said on the tin. But I am disappointed, because it’s apparent that GvK caught lightning in a bottle, and the rest of this franchise is just gonna be kinda dumb, and I probably shouldn’t bother watching any more of them. Alas.