Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Set hundreds of years after War for the Planet of the Apes, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes follows a young ape (Owen Teague) as he embarks on a perilous journey to rescue his kidnapped family members. Filmmaker Wes Ball, armed with a script by Josh Friedman, delivers a sluggish and mostly uninvolving misfire that gets off to a less-than-promising start, as Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes kicks off with an astonishingly lackluster opening stretch that’s compounded by its absence of compelling characters – with the arms-length atmosphere, beyond that point, perpetuated by an uneventful, padded-out narrative that contains few (if any) interesting elements or attributes (ie it’s all just so dull and pointless). The threadbare, episodic storyline, which seems to be unfolding in slow motion, is particularly problematic during a midsection that couldn’t possibly be more tedious (ie there’s a real sense of who-cares baked into the whole thing), and while the picture admittedly does conclude with an effective fight between Noa and Kevin Durand’s Proxima, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes‘ pervasively half-baked feel does, in the end, cement its place as a predominantly worthless followup that retroactively paints the preceding three films in a thoroughly negative light.

* out of ****