Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Directed by Michael Dougherty, Godzilla: King of the Monsters follows an assortment of one-dimensional characters, including Millie Bobby Brown’s Madison, Kyle Chandler’s Mark, and Vera Farmiga’s Emma, as they race to prevent a series of building-sized monsters from destroying the planet. Filmmaker Dougherty, working from a script written with Zach Shields, delivers a predominantly tedious disaster that strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go, as the movie boasts (or suffers from) an exceedingly, distractingly slick sensibility that’s reflected in its myriad of less-than-substantive elements – with this especially true of the picture’s uniformly underwhelming and incoherent action sequences. (Such moments, rendered entirely with computers, are about as convincing and compelling as a third-rate video game cutscene.) And although the movie is fleetingly tolerable when focused on the exploits of its impressively eclectic human cast, which includes David Strathairn, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, and Charles Dance, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is increasingly dominated by dimly-lit set-pieces that, perhaps inevitably, pave the way for an interminable second half that’s capped off with an astonishingly tedious final battle – with the end result a very expensive-looking flop that seems unlikely to please even the most indiscriminate of viewers.

* out of ****

Leave a comment