What on earth was Peter Jackson thinking when he made King Kong? And no, I’m not talking about the three-hour runtime, or that we spend a full hour of the movie waiting to see the big monkey. I’m talking about his decision to cast the lean, suave drip king Adrien Brody, a man after my own heart, as the romantic lead in his mega-monkey spectacle.
Everybody in 2005’s King Kong is at Critical Mass levels of hotness. Jack Black, Colin Hanks, Naomi Watts, Thomas Kretschmann, Evan Parke, Kyle Chandler… even Craig Hall, playing the tweedy bespectacled sound recordist, Mike, and the utterly charming John Sumner, playing the old, portly cameraman, Herb, are incredibly sexy here — I don’t make the rules — and they only get sexier as they trudge across Skull Island firing machine guns and running from dinosaurs. But Brody, playing the sad, mopey playwright Jack Driscoll, outshines them all.
The Set-Up
King Kong, as dutifully retold by Jackson, is the story of a lunatic filmmaker with a death wish, Carl Denham (Black), who tricks all his friends and a bunch of strangers into getting on board a spooky boat for a one-way trip to a murder island. He tries to con more money out of his producers to fund his picture and his mad sea voyage, but failing that, he just grabs his camera equipment, hoists anchor, and escapes.
We first meet Jack in Carl’s cabin. He’s moody, he’s been writing for hours, and he’s ready to get paid and get the f*ck out. Carl uses the promise of a $2,000 check to trick Jack into staying on the boat to finish the script, and frankly, as a freelance writer, this would totally work on me too. Next stop — monkey island, baby!
Unlike in previous cracks at the King Kong story, Jack isn’t the obvious romantic lead here. This is an adventure story, after all. Those tend to require overtly masculine male leads, and that’s not really Jack’s vibe. The 1933 original King Kong and its 1976 remake have their own Jacks, too, and these films not only foreground Jack and Ann’s relationship immediately, but they also make Jack this impossibly dazzling Hollywood star dripping with swaggering machismo and casual misogyny. Played by Bruce Cabot in 1933 and Jeff Bridges in 1976, Jack’s only concern is ever a single-minded pursuit of the girl.
Jackson fills King Kong with enough worthy hot dudes for Ann Darrow (Watts) to fall for, most notably the B-picture star Bruce Baxter (Chandler), while portraying Jack as an emasculated, struggling sad sack. Jackson loves kicking Jack while he’s down — without a proper cabin, Jack finds a makeshift living space below deck among the ship’s animal pens. As a result, he likely spends the whole trip smelling like animal dung. But I’ll admit, the yellow light of the lantern in that wooden cage, the thick stench of animal shit, the clacking away at all hours at his typewriter — that’s quite a sexy John Steinbeck vibe, and I’m sure we’ve all had at least one hookup like Jack in our lives.
None of that bothers Ann, who’s read all Jack’s plays and thinks he’s absolutely brilliant. They have a meet-cute in the galley, she bumps into him as he returns from a shower shirtless, and later, they hook up in her cabin.
But Jackson keeps putting Jack through the wringer — when Ann is kidnapped by natives, Jack runs around the ship, drenched in seawater and rain, to tell the captain (Kretschmann) to turn around. And when the crew travels to shore to rescue her from Kong, Jack gets his share of tumbles, injuries, and giant bug attacks. But through the native village, Jack keeps his classy black peacoat and windswept hair, and he never loses that certain crepuscular sex appeal that makes Brody such a delicious actor.
Skull Island
Jack Driscoll might be the horniest character in cinema. The dude risks it all to get laid by an actress he met, like, a week ago and 17 other dudes die before he finally gets her back. So either he’s down bad, or he’s actually in love. Or neither option could be right.
Jack’s certainly the lovestruck type, don’t get me wrong. You could imagine sharing cigarettes with him as he wistfully talks about how, last night, he met some gorgeous somebody in a bar but never got their number and it’s torturing him. Like, that tracks. But outside of the love story, there’s a curious thematic engine at work in Jackson’s King Kong about fate versus free will. Ann’s not in control of her life, and she feels like forces beyond her understanding are pulling her toward her destiny. So too does Jack pursue her, I think, not because he’s in love with her or because he wants a hookup, but because he’s being compelled in that direction because he cannot think of anything else to do because chasing the girl is the obvious mission at hand. It’s what the hero of a film would do — Jack should know, he’s the one writing the script.
The way Jackson frames Brody compares favorably to the other men in the story, namely Chandler’s hunky movie star Bruce, the typecast-heroic actor. Whereas a more generic monster film would force Bruce into the leading-man role, King Kong keeps him at the periphery. Bruce might play an action hero, but in real life, he’s just a coward and a prude who only looks out for his own skin — and Jack is everything he isn’t. While Jackson tears down the preening image of the He-Man in Bruce, offering chance after chance for him to buck up and do the right thing, only for him to rebuff them, Jack tackles every challenge thrown at him. Eventually, Brody’s running around Skull Island full of determination and an “I haven’t washed my hair since we left New York, and I’ve worn this shirt for a week” look, and Bruce is trying to convince the crew to abandon Ann and head back to the ship. Chandler gets all the long shots, and Brody gets the closeups. Chandler’s body, likewise, isn’t respected by the camera — we always see him from a distance, and always from eye level or higher, like we’re looking down on him. Save for one time: the insect pit. When giant spiders, worms, and locusts are trying to tear Jack, Carl, Jimmy (Jamie Bell), and company to shreds, Bruce soars in on a vine with a machine gun in one hand, like the daring hero in, well, a Bruce Baxter movie. It’s the only moment in the film Bruce earns a hero shot. Meanwhile, Jackson’s camera exclusively gives Brody hero shots and closeups. It’s Brody’s eyes that tell us how to feel and his body we track through the action sequences.
Jack throws his life on the line for his friends, hangs from a log as Kong tries to throw him off, and comforts Jimmy after the death of his father figure — the first mate, Hayes (Parke). Also, Brody body-checks a raptor in this movie, which is pretty f*ckin’ dope.
After Bruce and the rest of the crew save him from the insect pit, Jack treks off solo, in his dirty safari couture with a machine gun slung over his shoulder, to find Ann and leave the island. In his daring rescue, he tries to escape Kong’s liar by climbing down a cliff on a huge vine with Ann on his back, and when Kong tries to kill him, he grabs onto a giant bat’s leg and uses it like a hang-glider to escape. It’s like a goddamn Yoshi’s Island level come to life, it’s great.
Every horrible, life-or-death situation Jack falls into becomes an opportunity for Jackson to double down on the character’s heroism. Of course, Skull Island turns the whole cast into a bunch of badasses, and even Carl goes apeshit on a bunch of giant bugs, using a rifle as a bo staff like he’s some kind of Shaolin monk. But Jack is the only primary character who gets gruffer, hotter, and more badass without compromising his values. Every fight for his life reinforces Jack’s innate emotional sensitivities and more pronounced beta characteristics, and ultimately, that might be the key to his sex appeal — his heroism is sexy because of his sad and sensitive side, not despite it.
Back To New York
Getting away from Brody for a minute — this movie rocks. King Kong is a three-hour-20-minute epic that feels like a breeze because Jackson wheels out every trick in his book and completely reinvents the movie every 20 minutes. It’s a film about vaudeville, the film business, and a con artist; it’s a lighthearted shipbound adventure story, then an homage to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; it’s a punishing monster movie, a Jurassic Park–style dino adventure, a monkey-meets-girl romance, and a kaiju film. But for all his genre fluidity, Jackson maintains a distinct visual style and gravitas. Every time an extra dies, it feels visceral and sudden. His sense of pace here is incredible, too, despite the runtime — every scene, every shot, serves a purpose for the characters, the story, and the tone, and King Kong doesn’t have a wasted minute.
Jack and Ann have complete character arcs, which is way more than I ask for in my giant ape movies. They both want to be successful, in their own ways — he wants a profitable career on Broadway, and she wants to make it as an actress, or at least perform vaudeville for decent pay. They both get what they want in the end, only to realize that this isn’t what they wanted at all, that what they really needed the whole time was each other.
Carl and company drug Kong and haul him off to New York City for the film’s final act. The New York bit at the end is always the least engaging part of these Kong adaptations, and Jackson’s is no exception. The story becomes much less free and loose, and the big Broadway show to the monkey escape to the finale on the Empire State Building always feels like a poorly designed amusement park ride, where you’re always aware that you’re on rails, being shuttled around from one drop to another. The characters have mostly finished their transformations. We’ve seen all the sides of Jack that we’re liable to see. Nobody has any lessons yet to learn because the film always ends before Carl realizes that, whoops, he’s indirectly responsible for Kong’s death because he brought him to western civilization.
At least in Jackson’s film, he shakes things up with a time jump, then takes a few scenes to reintroduce his characters. Carl’s hamming it up as the new bigshot in town, the safari hero who captured the giant ape alive. Ann’s performing in an elite ballet company, yet she’s not happy. And Jack’s back in depressed New York writer form, watching a performance of his new play.
You can tell Jack’s barely keeping a lid on his masochistic action hero personality, though. Kong escapes — who could have foreseen this?! — and begins smashing up the city, and Jack wastes no time, leaping into action GTA style. Jack jacks a cab and leads Kong on a chase through the city. When Ann’s on top of the Empire State Building with Kong and the planes are closing in, Jack jukes a cop and kicks a soldier, commandeering an elevator to the top floor to rescue her. Jungle-brand Jack returns for the finale, racing through the streets of New York like he’s back on Skull Island, ready to do whatever it takes to save Ann.
Conclusion
Maybe it’s the sad eyes. Brody always looks unfulfilled in King Kong, like he’s constantly watching the things he loves most drift slowly out of his reach. But what’s sexiest about Brody’s Jack Driscoll is that, for all his melancholy smiles and forlorn looks, he’s put in a situation that requires him to become an alpha male, a soldier. He has to fight to the top of the food chain and push through dinosaur stampedes, giant insects, and certain death to rescue a woman he only just met.
That subversion of the alpha-male action hero is the key to Jackson’s King Kong. Alongside Jack Driscoll, the giant ape, of all characters, is given a vibrant and sensitive interiority that clashes with his aggressive virility and daunting physical strength. Kong can snap a dino’s mouth in half like it’s nothing, but he also loves watching the sunset! He’s a vegetarian! He laughs at Ann’s pratfalls! And in the finale, when Kong’s rampaging through New York, swatting pedestrians aside like ants, he’s only doing it to find Ann, too. Like Jack on Skull Island, he’s thrust into an urban jungle full of loud noises, constant terror, and tons of stuff that wants to kill him, and he attaches his will to live, his drive to persevere, to Ann, this virginal symbol of purity and sympathy. He uses his dormant brute-force external self to unlock his vulnerable, compassionate internal self. Weakness is sexy!
Brody gave his best early performances in art films like Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and, in his Oscar-winning role, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. Those movies built Brody’s career in a way that allowed him to do the more populist stuff like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, but to me, Brody will always be two roles: Jack from King Kong, and one half of The Brothers Bloom. Sure, Brody makes bad career choices and seems like kind of a scummy guy, but I hope that one day I can wear expensive suits, fall in love with a kooky heiress, and drag a chain of horrible, intriguing personal history behind me like Brody’s Bloom. In King Kong, that sad boy hermit is there, too, but it’s obfuscated by a gun-wielding kuudere exterior, the performance he has to put on to save the woman he loves. He might body-check a velociraptor, but at the end of the day, he’s a hopeless romantic! He writes a romantic comedy play specifically for Ann! She doesn’t wind up starring in it, but he watches his show anyway, studying his characters, maybe listening for the pieces of Ann he wrote into the script, as a way of hearing her voice again. And if that won’t give you a primal, frenzied, head-over-heels crush on the guy, I don’t know what will.
Do you agree that Adrien Brody is phenomenally attractive in Peter Jackson’s King Kong? Comment below with your thoughts.
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