Bad Habits - Going ape - November 30 2005
King Kong is sometimes awesome, but often dull
If anyone can make me believe she’s in love with a big ape, it’s Naomi Watts. In Mulholland Drive and 21 Grams, she crawled into the skin of most emotions available to an actor. Now she’s a strong presence in a movie-based video game, Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and the game would be subpar if not for scenes starring her and the big, hairy stalker.
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Ann (Watts) involuntarily meets Kong in the jungles of Skull Island, where she and a film crew have traveled to check out the dinosaur-land environment. She and the guerilla hold hands, swing on trees and look deeply into each other’s eyes.
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Strangely, chemistry between them is palpable. Something sympathetic resides in Kong’s wet eyes and his human-like reactions. He even steals the scenes he’s in. You know the expression in Hollywood: Don’t work with kids or animals.
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Watts’ acting runs up against another obstacle. When her computer-graphic lips move, her mouth is out of synch with her voice. Her tongue flops around as if it’s slipping on sushi. In close-ups, Ann doesn’t even look like Watts. She looks like Scarlett Johansson.
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Kong and Watts don’t get enough game-screen time, about one-fourth of it. In their scenes, we gamers play as chest-pounding Kong, fighting giant snakes and biting the heads off flying dinosaurs. The effects are among the most fun and cool-looking sequences since The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, another game based on a Jackson-directed film.
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But Kong should have given us more Kong and less of the game’s major premise: We play mostly as screenwriter Jack (voiced by actor Adrien Brody), accompanying actress Ann, director Carl (Jack Black) and side character Hayes (Evan Parke). We trek across treacherous caves, puddles and woodlands to escape death from big, mean creatures.
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Quite simply, it’s just not much fun, as Jack, to pick up pointy sticks and throw them at raptor-like bat things, big worms, huge scorpions and other fantasy creatures. Now and then, we get lucky and find a rifle to shoot at them. Otherwise, we’re constantly on the lookout for spears and stabby bones that conveniently happen to be lying about.
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The dialogue isn’t crisp, either. There’s a lot of “Don’t wait for us. Hurry up and find Ann,” and so on. Black, though, delivers a few funny lines as a self-obsessed director. And the end of the game is shockingly, emotionally effective.
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With all those good parts to count on, it’s surprising Kong isn’t consistently fun. It’s a product of Ubisoft, a game company that rarely falters, and it was made with help from Jackson, whose final two Lord of the Rings games were riveting.
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But too often, I found myself suffering through repetitive parts just to get to more Kong and Watts parts. I’m not just saying that because I want more games starring Watts. I will say, though, her horror hit, The Ring, could be made into a good adventure. I’d take what I could get.
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thegamedork@creativeloafing.com
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Doug Elfman is an award-winning columnist who is also the TV critic at the Chicago Sun-Times.
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New To You — Used Game Of The Week
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Madagascar is one of the best children’s games of 2005, and it’s selling for $20 and less in used-game stores. The game is based on the animated movie of the same name. It casts gamers in the form of a zebra, a giraffe and other cute characters.
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But what makes Madagascar fun is a creative series of pathways, from a zoo to city streets, a boat and an island. Plus, the British penguins are adorable. It’s available for Xbox, PS2 and GCube. It’s rated E 10+ for cartoon violence and crude humor.