King Kong (12A)

The beast is a real beauty

Over three hours for a remake of a 100-minute film? Even allowing for 17 minutes of end credits, you wonder how Peter Jackson could possibly justify this stretch, short of having Kong perform a dance routine to "I Wanna Be Like You". You may well worry, if you struggled through Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which didn't merely redefine the word "longueurs" but translated it into Old English.

Yet in Jackson's new epic, there's not a moment wasted. It comes as no surprise that King Kong is conceived on a massive scale, but what's truly impressive is that Jackson has matched his gargantuan ambition with a richness of imagination, a heady sense of fun, even a genuine finesse, making King Kong not just the punchiest but the classiest Hollywood extravaganza in ages. Forgive my breathless tabloidese - for once, the big Christmas attraction actually merits letting your hair down a bit.

Jackson is not simply remaking his favourite classic in his own image, but paying a tender tribute to Cooper and Schoedsack's 1933 RKO original by setting his film in the 1930s: this is, to all intents and purposes, a Golden Age rip-roarer made with 21st-century technology. Jackson starts by immersing us in a vivid recreation of Depression-era Manhattan, complete with allusions to iconic contemporary photos of soup queues and construction workers straddling skyscraper girders. The slow build-up - Kong doesn't loom into sight until an hour in - makes the eventual explosion of spectacle all the more dazzling, but the start is more than simply scene-setting.

The first hour is stolen by Jack Black - wild-eyed as ever, but less abrasive - as Carl Denham, a fanatical movie-maker dead set on visiting a mysterious uncharted island and capturing visions never witnessed before. And even though generations have witnessed them before, repeatedly - and in a 1976 Dino de Laurentiis remake, too - the new Kong manages to convince us that we're going to see something unprecedented. Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens persuade us to take this epic seriously by taking it seriously themselves. There's nothing camp or knowing here, except for one in-joke nudge at the original, and it's a good one: looking for an actress to fill a size four dress, Denham says, "Fay's a size four", only to be told, "Yes, but she's doing a picture with RKO."

The winsome ingenue stepping into Fay Wray's tattered frock is Naomi Watts as down-at-heel hoofer Ann Darrow. Pausing only to collect Adrien Brody, as a Barton Fink-style dramatist turned screenplay hack, Denham's team set out on a tramp steamer crewed by, among others, Andy Serkis as a grimacing cook out of the same galley as Long John Silver. Soon, fog is descending and things are looking ominous - especially when cabin boy Jamie Bell and first mate Evan Parke take time out for an impromptu seminar on Heart of Darkness.

Once we get to Skull Island, Jackson lets rip, and continues to rip thereafter. Our first sight of the place is impressive indeed - rocky outcrops shaped like screaming ape heads, and a storm-lashed palisade clearly designed by the architects of Mordor, heralding an encounter with an African tribe on secondment from Cannibal Zombie Holocaust. Much of the spectacle is out-and-out horror: a sequence in a pit of cockroaches, crabs and flesh-eating penile molluscs is simply one of the most repellent things I've seen on film.

But there's also genuine magnificence here, and a truly regal Kong. Realistically depicted as a silverback gorilla, who happens to be 25 feet high, he's the most eloquent CGI creation yet. His repertoire of gestures and facial expressions is extraordinary, thanks partly to the film's other performance by Andy Serkis, which - as with his Gollum in the Tolkien trilogy - has been digitally infused into the creature. Kong behaves pretty much as you might scientifically expect a gorilla to, although certain reactions seem just on the right side of anthropomorphism - notably in a bizarre scene where Ann mesmerises him with a display of vaudeville footwork. Shifting grouchily on his haunches, Kong resembles a jaded Prohibition-era gangster appraising his new moll. And when he beats his chest, after hammering a Tyrannosaurus, the sheer pride of his primal machismo is genuinely exhilarating.

It's altogether a film of primal machismo, in which Jackson shakes a meaty challenging fist at Steven Spielberg, showing him who's the biggest, hairiest ape in the business now. The Skull Island scenes make Jurassic Park look like a council playground: a thrilling, if gratuitous, virtuoso section features a brontosaurus stampede and an extraordinary routine - with brilliantly conceived 3D choreography - in which Kong and a T Rex are suspended perilously in dangling creepers.

It's in the closing New York section that Jackson really does honour to the bond between Ann and her hulking admirer. The attraction here is less sexual than the original implied: what the couple share, it's poignantly suggested, is a love of postcard twilights. As for the Empire State climax, Jackson goes at it with serious intent to make a classic text new again - it's vertiginous and properly moving, and when the film winds up by repeating one of cinema's most famous closing lines, it has all the poetic force you'd wish for.

One thing seriously sours the pleasure: Jackson's representation of the Skull Islanders as grotesque, slavering bogey-people. You anticipate the justifications: they're not really black people, they're more like human Orcs; or, it's not really racist caricature, but a detached, knowing allusion to 1930s caricature (retro-racism, as it were). You'd have to be pretty cynical to buy either argument, and I certainly found it hard to get back into the spirit of the action after this horrible sequence. It's an ugly blemish on a film that in most other respects is, if not the proverbial Eighth Wonder of the World, certainly one of the marvels of digital cinema.

j.romney@independent.co.uk