Rating: D
Dir: Liu Hang
Star: Ning Yue, Yang Cheng Ming, Dong Hui, Wang Lei
While that is the official title, as given on the poster (below), it is a bit Chinglish: King Kong Returns would make better sense, I feel. However, I’m hard pushed to care much, since this is pretty terrible. It begins with a little kid losing his father in a road accident in the jungle, and being rescued by a giant ape. Fifteen years later, Gu Yao (Dong) is now running round in a loincloth, dodging cease and desist letters from the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs. A new expedition under Ma Hongqiang (Yang), along with new wife Li Zi Lan (Wang) and his daughter Ma Ke, (Ning) comes into the area, and are saved from a landslide by King Kong.
Hongqiang’s boss Ba Zer demands he capture the large primate, threatening his family to ensure compliance. Yao has been befriended (as well as convinced to wear skinny jeans!) by Ke, and is caged up by her father, with the intent of using him as bait. But Zi Lan stumbles across Yao’s old backpack – still in remarkably pristine condition after fifteen years in a tropical jungle – and a drawing in it reveals (gasp!) that Yao is her long lost son. While this convinces Hongqiang to go against his employer, there are other minions who remain loyal. These include the heavily armed ones who accompany Ba Zer, when he himself shows up on the scene. Probably yelling “Show me the monkey!” or something along those lines. Let’s not get into gorillas being apes, rather than monkeys, okay?
This is underwhelming in a whole spectrum of ways. It doesn’t even have the necessary level of monkey mayhem (or “ape-pocalypse” if you’re still feeling pedantic) to qualify as a When Chinese Animals Attack movie. Kong does little here except gallop around the forest and occasionally throw people very unconvincingly into trees. If it had copied (or aped?) the inspiration harder, and had him rampaging around Shanghai, it might have worked. But Kong here isn’t that big: despite the poster, not much larger than a Gigantopithecus (top). No helicopters here either. Alternatively, it could have leaned into the relationship with Yao. Parental in nature, it feels more wholesome than kidnapping a Hollywood starlet in her négligée, for unspoken purposes I don’t want to begin to imagine.
The makers just can’t be bothered, and so the movie limps to an ending somehow more disappointing than what has gone before. At sixty-three minutes, there’s barely enough here to qualify as a feature. Though the short running-time is one of the few things going for it, in that it only ruined some of my evening. The generally feeble nature might explain why Kong’s rights owners haven’t shut this down. A Streisand effect is possible, and the film itself does a very good job of strangling any potential for success. In this case, it is audience boredom, far more than beauty, which killed the beast.