“I love crazy ideas. They made me rich.”

After the sturdy but polarizing Godzilla, the second (Kong: Skull Island) and third (Godzilla: King of the Monsters) shaky steps of the Legendary’s MonsterVerse didn’t give me confidence that the fledgling reboot-hybrid series would ever really get its feet underneath it. It seemed unlikely that it would ever become the type of “event” franchise that it strived to be. Nevertheless, each film made like half a billion dollars, so the series had to get its planned culmination, Godzilla vs. Kong, which doesn’t necessarily seem steady on its feet and doesn’t really feel like a climax but still made like half a billion dollars.

Spoiler alert: Godzilla and King Kong fight each other in this film. And their second tussle stands head and shoulders above everything else on offer. The first fight is weighed down by its elaborate underwater sequence and the finale—in which they briefly team up to vanquish a larger threat—is inevitably underwhelming. But the middle one is quite good, with motion-captured human personalities giving the fighters a sense of physicality that comes and goes in this type of CGI-dominant film.

I think in my heart of hearts I could get on board with some of these slapdash “live-action” cartoon extravaganzas if they would mostly stick to achievable camera angles. I get that the days of the monsters being men in elaborate rubber suits are long gone, but to maintain the illusion that I’m watching an actual event taking place, at least pretending to anchor the virtual frame in the virtual space to something would go a long way. I guess you could make the case that a drone-mounted camera could be doing all these cartwheels and whatnot, but I think some groundedness might help connect the larger-than-life combatants to the puny humans. In any case, I’ll admit that I was impressed with this digital spectacle after having cool reactions to the beastly MMA in the previous films, though it does destroy Godzilla’s terrifying indifference that was carefully maintained in Gareth Edwards’s 2014 film.

But—nearly everything else about it is by-the-numbers box checking, from the bland cast of humans tasked with running around, explaining fake science, and reiterating the large-scale actions we’ve just seen happen before our very eyes, to the faux-epic introductory sequences of totally digital vistas and secret military compounds, to the butt-scratching and doo-wop introduction that starts us off on the wrong foot. Does the film want to be an epic clash of the titans or make fun of people who find the idea fascinating? Caustic irony supports neither serious nor silly filmmaking.

Functioning as a merging sequel to two separate movies, its screenplay is structurally unsound, flailing around in search of a central conflict, failing to clarify its stakes or identify a suitable allegorical layer, favoring the Kong storyline so much that we almost forget about the Godzilla one and barely tangling the threads together even though the characters occasionally cross paths. In each storyline, a serious main character is paired up with comic relief to keep eyes and ears on the monsters. A Kong expert (Rebecca Hall)—who has adopted a deaf-mute child (Kayle Hottle) from Skull Island who happens to have a psychic connection to the ape—teams up with a disreputable pseudoscientist (Alexander Skarsgård) to transport Kong to the hollow center of the earth, a primordial realm of wonky gravity and pulpy fantasy imagination, on an expedition funded by a billionaire industrialist (Demián Bichir) whose life’s work is to exterminate the Titans (an umbrella term for the all monsters including Godzilla and Kong). Meanwhile a young girl (Millie Bobby Brown) whose father (Kyle Chandler) is a higher-up at Monarch—both characters were in the previous Godzilla movie and are basically here to pass the torch and collect a check—drags her buddy (Julian Dennison) along to track down a paranoid conspiracy theorist podcaster (Brian Tyree Henry) who has taken a job at the evil cybernetics company to get inside info and believes something fishy is going on, and together the three of them uncover a nefarious plot. Little about these human dramas is worth much of anything. It’s basically all in service of delivering exposition and sci-fi babble and moving characters into the right places to witness the fan service monster stuff. And there’s so much of it! If we’re just here to watch the monster fisticuffs, let’s just cut to the chase, why are we letting ourselves get sidetracked with two separate stories that no one really cares about? Did the parts of the screenplay that should make us care about these stories get cut for time?

Wingard, for his part, brings little to the table beyond a passable, workmanlike rendition of the poor story, while sometimes struggling with the basics. At the very least, this is supposed to be a big dumb fun action movie. Too often it only meets the first two qualifiers and merely delivers a brash, joyless blob of expensive digital schmutz. What stinks is that the bones of a good movie series exist. Or maybe not like a whole skeleton but at least a spine and some ribs and a femur or two and certainly a skull. The hollow earth concept is cool, the sign language thing is cool (and kudos for actually using a deaf actress and making her deafness a crucial part of the plot instead of just meeting a diversity quota), Kong living in a Truman Show-esque dome is cool, Kong chained to an aircraft carrier while a hostile Godzilla approaches is cool, telepathically controlling Mechagodzilla via the severed head of Ghidorah is cool, Godzilla blasting a hole to the earth’s core with radioactive breath is cool, Kong war axes fashioned from dead Godzilla fins is cool. Why is it so boring to watch? Why does it feel so soulless?