Fresh from The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson could presumably have done anything he wanted. What he apparently wanted was to do a remake. Check that, a second remake. A 21st-century Kong. A CGI Kong. A kung-fu Kong. (Three T. rexes at a time, one hand tied up with a savory maiden.) And not least, a three-hour Kong, even though it takes over an hour to get to him, and though he must share screen time after that with an entire ecosystem of slimy, slithery critters. Jackson, remaking almost slavishly the 1933 version rather than the rerouted 1976 version, returns the action to the original period, plays up and jokes up, with help from the turtle-faced Jack Black, the film-within-the-film element (Fay Wray is unavailable because "she's shooting a picture with RKO"), and imbues the beauty-and-beast theme with the sort of modish, operatic amplification that says so much about our Age of Indulgence, squeezing every last drop of emotion from the death of the ape, all the way down to the emotion (among the most sensitive individuals) of mirth. The Kong films show a sharp decline, this one a farther step down from the last than the last was down from the first. Three hours are not automatically "better" than one and three-quarters or two and one-quarter. Even the supposed progress in special effects — from stop-motion models to computer animation — is largely illusory. The former falsity of stiffness and creakiness has simply been replaced by the falsity of fluidness and facileness. Exhibit A: the stampede of brontosauruses, an enlarged replication of the running of the bulls at Pamplona, wherein these nimble, fleet-footed behemoths scarcely seem to occupy the same space as the humans, even when stepping on them. Exhibit B: the attack of the giant bats on Kong, flittering like shadows and creating a timely diversion that affords the boring romantic couple (Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody) a means of escape by hang-gliding from a bat's feet, easy as catching a ride on the trolley. In whatever measure such effects might be "better" than the old, it's too short a measure to make up for the falloff in imagination. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd