'Godzilla: King of the Monsters' review: More action than substance
NEW YORK (WABC) -- "Godzilla" will reign as "King of the Monsters" and the #1 box office attraction this weekend, on track to gross more than $55 million no matter what I say about his latest adventure.
After all, as the movie points out, "This is Godzilla's world, we just get to live in it."
Many people spend the movie scrambling to stay out of his way, but the lingering question is always, is the big guy our foe or our friend?
Over the course of 35 movies, Godzilla has been both an ally and an adversary, and his thermonuclear sizzle and 16-story size guarantee that he will always upstage his human co-stars, diminish their talent, and make even great performers like Vera Farmiga seem less believable.
Farmiga plays, Emma, a scientist who has developed a machine to communicate with the giant beasts called Titans who are at rest and in hiding around the world until she decides to wake them all up to save the planet.
They're everywhere, battling for dominance, heeding the call of a rival alpha to Godzilla named Khidorah.
The three-headed, flying creature summons the others for a clash of the titans that quickly gets out of Emma's control. She's divorced from her husband, played by Kyle Chandler, and the couple lost their son during Godzilla's rampage in San Francisco at the climax of the last movie.
Their daughter is played by Millie Bobby Brown, from Netflix's "Stranger Things, and she is so brilliant that I almost started to believe that she was in real peril.
I did not detect a single false note in her performance, which is a lot more than can be said about others with a lot more experience.
But let's face it, acting isn't the point. We pay to see the monsters fight, and for more than 116 mind-numbing minutes, that's exactly what they do.
This too-long movie is just a warm up for the big battle on the big screen with King Kong, which is set to arrive in theaters next March. I can hardly wait...
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