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'King Kong': Love and adventure reign equally

I'm in love with a cartoon monkey.

And as love will do, "King Kong" stomped, battered and wrung me to mush.

Peter Jackson's thrilling retelling of the 1933 classic is a masterpiece of lashing action invention, perhaps the most impressive monster movie ever, and the saddest thing I've seen in years. This is cinematic supremacy of the most satisfying class, a breathtaking achievement that never ceases to rattle the imagination, refusing to let up on the next visual — and emotional — astonishment. At more than three hours of jacked-up mayhem and heartbreak, it's downright exhausting.

Universal Pictures 'King Kong' 4 out of 5 stars Director: Peter Jackson Starring: Naomi Watts, Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis, Thomas Kretschmann Run time: 187 minutes Release date: Dec. 14, 2005 Rating: PG-13 for frightening adventure violence and some disturbing images. See showtimes On the set See finished frames and the work in progress in this "King Kong" slideshow. On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Jackson took his spot as our best action director, swiping Steven Spielberg's tiara, with the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. But "King Kong" reveals a massive, fragile heart behind the layers and layers of computer-made sorcery. With a just-so touch, Jackson and his co-writers make the story throb with the tragic sorrow of star-crossed love. An unlikely tenderness trumps sentimentality, and it's realized entirely through gesture, expression and the big ape's soulful eyes. Kong, the loneliest 25-foot-tall gorilla in the world, might be a cluster of digital pixels (that moves to the impeccable, and zoologically correct, physicality of actor Andy Serkis — Gollum in "Rings"), but he is the best actor in the movie.

Not to diminish Naomi Watts, Kong's Barbie doll of desire, and Adrien Brody, the gallant writer who also loves her. The actors excel, giving everything they've got to Jackson's computer-animated challenges (try acting with something that isn't there), while knowing this could be the most exposure they will ever get.

Jack Black gets high billing, but his abbreviated acting chops zoom into relief among his co-stars, including the superb Thomas Kretschmann, Evan Parke and Serkis, who also plays the ship's scrappy cook, Lumpy. Some viewers have griped about the pacing of the first act, but the film's true weak spot is Black, a generally appealing comic actor. Jackson fumbles badly by letting Black utter the story's famous final line, which is now a flimsy punctuation mark to an opera of smashing drama.

Jackson keeps it simple. He sticks to the skeletal narrative of the Merian C. Cooper original: During the Great Depression, opportunistic filmmaker Carl Denham (Black) leads a steamboat, its crew and an aspiring actress, Ann Darrow (Watts), to a fabled uncharted island, where he wants to shoot his masterwork. The seething island natives (Jackson taps his horror background to make them hellish voodoo zombies) kidnap Darrow and sacrifice her to Kong. Kong falls hard. After an onslaught of death and destruction, Denham captures Kong and sails the gorilla to New York, where the giant is displayed on Broadway. Kong gets loose, snatches Darrow and climbs the Empire State Building. Grab your hankie.

Watching the 1933 "King Kong," with its still amazing stop-motion animation, it's clear a modern version demands nuance, complexity, some fleshing out. Jackson does this better in some places than in others, largely expanding ten-fold the misadventures of the ship's crew on Skull Island. The cinematic brilliance of these sequences — a stampede of brontosauruses, a gorge crawling with disgusting giant insects (a nod to the once-lost "spider pit" scene in the '33 film) — cannot be downplayed. Jackson and his artists, from designers to editors, have worked out action worlds of bottomless complexity and ambition, hatching voluptuously witty ideas that exhilarate and transport.

Yet beating ever so gently at the core of the spectacle is a most elemental love story. To tell too much would mar the savor of surprise, but it can be said Kong makes a swell if touchy lover. He feels profoundly, displaying a range of moods and personality through the sensitive detail of Serkis' performance. Watch Kong's eyes. With delicate poignancy, they say everything.

Kong is the classic over-charged alpha male, the bar-brawling defender of his woman's honor. Yet he would probably chill to Shakespeare and the creamy strains of Johnny Mathis given the chance. A decade ago, Robert Bly wrote about guys like Kong.

Darrow loves Kong back, but more as a protective and faithful Great Dane. Watts does away with the shrieking helplessness of Fay Wray in the first "King Kong." Her damsel is rarely in distress. She uses charming ingenuity to soothe the savage breast.

Even when Kong has her in his mighty grasp as he charges through the jungle, snapping trees in half, Darrow keeps her flailing head on. These are exceptional scenes, one of many that strike a beautiful realism. There she is as the gorilla gallops at harrowing speeds, her body twisting and whipping, just shy of having her neck snapped. Maybe I like this part so much because watching the movie, I felt the same way.