I think we’ve confidently reached the point where the “kaiju” in a Godzilla movie can easily hijack the film from its human cast. Never was I more malaise-stricken than during the live-action scenes in “Godzilla x Kong”, where capable actors who put in a good performance every time regardless of pay or cast heading (like Rebecca Hall or Brian Tyree Henry) couldn’t save their loquacious appearances from making-plain the techno-babble that rationalizes the film’s monsters & their “world”, in a language understood by us surface-dwellers.

Who cares? Aside from the parallels between the little deaf tribal girl “who holds the key” and all the non-verbal grunting going on between the titans, scenes with dialogue are quickly shoved under the bed when the Big Boys start stomping around.

These action scenes, with decent special-effects even five movies on, are antithetical to those in the recent “Dune 2”: fights have a beginning, middle, and end, without cutaways; they’re generally framed in-full so viewers can see the blows and their consequences; and they weren’t finely-minced in the editing room. The broad stokes of the production design also seem to have some thought put into it: there’s good squish when Godzilla heat-beams into another beast’s mouth; a bridge of bones over a river of lava; a “mini-Kong” that plays like Gollum to King Kong’s Frodo; and the gangly movements of an “evil-Kong” that recalls the uninhibitedness of Mark Hamill’s Joker from the nineties’ “Batman” animated series.

But it’s all still not very original, isn’t it? How many more of these “Monsterverse” movies (and by extension TV series’) are we going to get before audiences get sick of them, or their diminished budgets start to affect what we see on screen, or are remade again? And while the wider design is fun, the details could have used some work: in the climax, the Great Pyramids seem to get destroyed three times over and yet are still standing in the background by the end of the scene. Considering the work that looks like went to the rest of the picture, that’s a big oversight. Doesn’t change that I was entertained.

2.5 out of 5