Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

Kong gets a robot glove in this one, and it isn’t even the silliest idea in the room. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire keeps tossing things at the wall: a hidden tribe of apes under the earth, a tyrant called the Skar King, a frost Titan he controls with a crystal, a telepathic Iwi tribe, an old prophecy, Mothra. Kong spends most of it underground, bonding with a scrappy young ape named Suko. Godzilla gets top billing and spends his scenes on a world tour, draining a French nuclear plant like a snack and turning his back spikes pink. The humans are just there to explain things. Rebecca Hall stays sincere, but Dan Stevens and Brian Tyree Henry are stuck with jokes that just sit there. When the Titans finally brawl, starting with Godzilla’s fight in Rome, it’s loud, goofy fun. It made $572 million worldwide. A 4.8 because the fights are big and everything between them is filler. $224 says you call your oven mitt the Kong glove at dinner tomorrow and nobody laughs but you.

What works: The Titan fights are big, colorful and silly in a way that works, and the Rome brawl and the final showdown deliver what the poster promises.

What doesn’t: The human characters are flat, most of the jokes fall flat, and Godzilla is missing for long stretches of a movie with his name first.

Who it’s for: Kids who line up action figures on the carpet and stage their own fights, and grown-ups who still do.