Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the weirdly punctuated fifth monster mash in the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse saga that kicked off with Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot Godzilla, is a good enough good time wherein a capable company of gifted actors elevate the predictable material. 

I refer, of course, to the ultra-heavyweights in the title roles: The last surviving 300-foot ape from Skull Island and the even larger (I think?) radiation-absorbing-and-redistributing amphibian are both showing their age in this fun but frivolous installment. They also seem to be burdened by more than a little mutual resentment that they’re in another team-up movie instead of being free to continue their solo star vehicles: This one is a direct sequel to 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, which I definitely saw and from which I cannot recall a goddamn frame. Their bickering-buddy-cop dynamic is clearly a concession to an increasingly competitive market for Kaiju flicks: The most recent Japanese production starring Big G, last year’s Godzilla Minus One, shares a title that sounds like an equation with this American one, but it cost about a 10th what Godzilla x Kong did—and it’s roughly 10 times as good. 

So Godzilla x Kong does the reluctant-allies thing for the second time in two movies, and it can’t quite hide that, despite their palpable love-hate chemistry on-screen, G and K probably don’t get along any better in real life than Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. Maybe Kong is jealous that this movie not only gives his scaly co-star top billing, but also lets him (?) claim the Colosseum in Rome as his very own dog bed, leaving it only reluctantly and curling up back inside the arena where Russell Crowe won an Academy Award for demanding “are you not entertained!?” once the day’s city-smashing is done. The big ape’s grievances are not without merit. While I can’t deny that unconscious speciesism almost certainly makes me more sympathetic to Kong than to the Artist Formerly Known as Gojira, based on their performances here, Kong is clearly the more versatile and expressive actor. 

The ever-reliable Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry, reprising their roles from the prior entry, are here too, demonstrating once again what stone-cold pros they both are when they’re not showing their bona fides in tonier flicks such as Passing and If Beale Street Could Talk, respectively. Henry, as a neurotic podcast host determined to blow the lid off the giant-monster conspiracy that that entire world already seems to know all about, has the easier job. His performance is all fright and astonishment, with minimal expository fiber. It’s Hall who must chew her ways through lines like “Tell the Italian military Rome would’ve been flattened if not for Godzilla!” and “It’s some undocumented vortex!” She does it, by God. She’s a trooper.

Hall’s character is also our emotional anchor, having adopted Jia (Deaf child actor Kaylee Hottle), presumed to be the last survivor of a tribe of people native to Skull. Jia feels like an outcast among the other scientists’ kids on the Monarch compound—Monarch being the multinational Kaiju-monitoring agency in these movies—but has a bond with Kong, with whom she can communicate in sign language. Dan Stevens shows up, too, as a naturalist/Kaiju veterinarian who makes his entrance using some kind of HoverCrane to pull an infected tooth from the (sedated) big ape’s mouth. The film does not tell us how much dope it takes to prevent Kong from waking up while you’re ripping one of his teeth out. I wanted to know.

The Dentistry Sequence, as future generations of cinephiles and Sight and Sound poll respondents shall doubtless refer to it, is the climax to what is in essence a fun short film that plays over the opening titles. Kong is on the hunt “SOMEWHERE IN HOLLOW EARTH,” as one of the film’s three best* location-establishing title cards tells us, and just the fact that he’s fleeing from a group of vicious, pack-hunting creatures seems to suggest his reign is faltering. I was sure I saw some gray fur in his face during this sequence, and the fact he must rely on cunning rather than brute strength to make his would-be predators back off suggests he’s slowing down. After that battle, a different creature steals Kong’s meal, and he just seems too tired to resist. He worked for his supper, too, ripping one of those pursuing creatures in half above his head and then showering its green entrails out of his fur beneath a waterfall. Truly, if I were rating just the first 10 minutes of this film, I’d award it five stars. 

Alas, there’s about another hour and 45 after that, which knocks the star count down to a respectable three, save for the five-star interlude wherein Kong, after suffering a greivous injury to his right forearm, gets upgraded with a fucking robot fist. The fist is not some jury-rigged solution welded together from M1 Abrams tanks and diesel locomotives or whatever, but a ready-to-wear, one-size-fits-one ape-cessory that the Monarch people just had lying around. No questions, please. Five stars.

My own unerring professionalism compels me to say there’s a plot to this film, wherein some kind of mysterious signal emanating from the world beneath the surface turns out to portend a threat that requires the combined might of G and K, and a whole lot of collateral damage, to resolve. It isn’t so absorbing that it kept me from wondering exactly how much of this film was computer-animated, as not just the creatures but many of the environments have a screensaver-y quality that, absent the truly immersive digital trickery of Avatar and its sequel, just looks a little flat. 

The 2014 Edwards Godzilla had a somber quality about it, a sense of the cost of all the destruction it documented, making it metaphorically of a piece with the best of the Toho Kaiju movies, including the 1954 original—suffused with the trauma of a nation that had two atomic bombs dropped on it in less than a decade prior—and 2023’s Godzilla Minus One. There’s none of that richness here. Even franchises built around a more thoughtful premise than two giant beasts duking it out for our amusement tend to become parodies of themselves by the fifth outing. Godzilla x Kong is fleet, fun, and forgettable, and that’s enough. 

Call it the Tyrannosaur of Low Expectations.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (PG-13, 115 minutes) opens at area theaters tonight, March 28.

*Writer’s note: The other two title cards in the top three are the one that says “SUBTERRANEAN REALM—UNCHARTED AREA” and the one that says “CAIRO, EGYPT” over a shot of the fucking pyramids.