THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY

REVIEWED - KING KONG: The new version of King Kong is a stunningly rendered example of delirious overkill, writes Donald Clarke

WHILE stamping the workmanlike Narnia and the boring Harry Potter beneath its size 84 feet, Peter Jackson's dizzyingly baroque meditation on the Stockholm Syndrome triumphantly gives one opposable finger to those of us who could see no sane reason to monkey around with RKO's original, beautifully neat King Kong. The structure of the 1933 version remains intact, but the director has upgraded every fitting, retooled every cornice and attached elaborate extensions to every available exterior wall.

There is far too much of it. Having thrown over $30 million of his own money at the project, Jackson seems to have claimed the right to forego narrative economy and progress directly to an extended director's cut. But every frame is so overpoweringly busy that this Kong never quite becomes boring. It's the best event picture of the year.

Aspects of the story have been expanded to such an extent that entirely new themes reveal themselves. The long opening section, during which Carl Denham (Jack Black), an enthusiastic movie producer, clatters about trying to find cast and crew for a floundering jungle adventure, features as lavishly evocative a representation of Depression-era New York as we have yet seen.

When Denham, after sweet-talking Naomi Watts's eager young actress and virtually kidnapping highbrow writer Adrien Brody, begins developing his ungainly project, Kong takes on the quality of an investigation into what makes Peter Jackson tick (though Black is now a deal more portly than the slimmed-down Kiwi).

On the boat trip to Skull Island, Denham's planned location, a young crew member (Jamie Bell) wields a copy of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, thus urging us to draw metaphysical conclusions from the natives' sacrifice of Watts to their monkey god. Each one of these diversions is worthwhile. Each one is half as long again as necessary.

If you are going to delay your title character's entrance for 70 minutes, then he had better be worth waiting for. In this respect, Jackson delivers. His movements modelled on those of Andy "Gollum" Serkis (who also appears as the ship's cook), the new Kong is more convincingly anthropoid than the stop-motion original or the suited extra in the dreary 1976 remake. He is also more violent.

In the course of the film's daunting three hours, Kong annihilates a greater number of citizens - albeit generally in self-defence - than any leading man since Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers. Not to mention an overabundance of dinosaurs, giant spiders and toothy worms. This lends an added queasiness to the always-unsettling relationship between small woman and giant ape.

Jackson's film exists to darken moods and underscore intentions. Watching the new picture is like opening the text of a much-loved novel to find that somebody has, using beautifully coloured inks, covered every page with elaborate footnotes and intricate curlicues. Certainly some elements of the enterprise become obscured in the reworking.

After the boat arrives at the island, the human dramas struggle for our attention as the brilliantly rendered creatures - again, too, too many - roar, squawk and rumble their way about the screen. By the time we get to the Empire State Building, after watching girl and beast slide comically around a frozen Central Park, the faltering romance between Watts and Brody has been made to seem an utter irrelevance.

Never mind. That final sequence does something few film-makers have managed before: it uses new technologies and techniques to re-energise an iconic situation from movie history without in any way superseding the original. Jackson and his team of thousands have handled the fragile RKO classic with great delicacy. One thinks of some huge besotted beast protecting a creature small enough to fit snugly into one of its mighty fists.