“Is that a mini-Kong?”

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire delivers precisely the pseudo-fun dog’s breakfast of clunky exposition, limp characters, shaky visual effects, wonky editing, flat humor, and empty spectacle that one should expect if they’ve been following along with Legendary’s poorly executed MonsterVerse from the beginning. There is no vision here, no personality, no passion—a reality even more glaring when films like Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One are being made by Toho Studios. Occasionally you’ll find evidence of an overachieving effects artist or an inspired bit of acting, but this is a movie with a purely financial impetus that exists primarily because Godzilla vs. Kong made half a billion dollars. Like that film, it’s directed by Adam Wingard, but clearly developed under the aegis of a boardroom of non-artists with little understanding of cinematic storytelling and no interest in monster movies.

King Kong is getting lonely in hollow earth and stumbles upon some long-lost relatives while Godzilla levels cities and feasts on nuclear reactors, and so we better have a stoner (Dan Stevens) go pull one of the ape’s teeth with heavy machinery and ask a conspiracy theorist (Brian Tyree Henry, once again the MVP of the bush league) to provide seismological expertise because we need to give the humans something to do. And don’t forget about the deaf girl (Kaylee Hottle) who is telepathically linked to Kong—or maybe you should, because even her mom (Rebecca Hall) seems to have forgotten this between films. The monsters fare somewhat better—the new villain, the Skar King, a psychotic giant orangutan, at least proves to be a nemesis for both of the titular titans, giving us a more integrated narrative than the previous film—but their storylines are undermined by having the humans explain them to the audience instead of letting visual storytelling do the heavy lifting.

Every positive review of all of these MonsterVerse movies implicitly espouses a belief that things like story, characterization, theme, dialogue—anything other than pure spectacle—comes at the cost of the spectacle itself. A little bit of lore is necessary, but other than that, why are you complaining that the characters are wet noodles when freaking Godzilla is fighting freaking King Kong? And so the great hope is that since The New Empire quite transparently only includes facsimiles of those extraneous things to check the boxes and get on with the good stuff, that the good stuff works like gangbusters. Godzilla vs. Kong was visually compelling enough that I don’t regret my time with it, but The New Empire doesn’t even have that little bit of selective creative passion. It’s thoroughly unimaginative with its choreography and almost comically unawed by the breathtaking revelations it is trying to portray. It does that stupid thing where it uses musical cues to suggest self-mocking parody just in case you don’t find it to be epic and want to enjoy it ironically. It’s also a bit less polished than its decidedly unpolished predecessor, whether it be a janky effect that pulls us out of the scene or a glaring continuity error in the editing.

Look, I’m all for Godzilla and King Kong and Mothra fending off an ice age while Christ the Redeemer looks on—that sounds as awesome to me now as it would have when I was twelve—but this movie doesn’t earn the right to do that, nor does it pull it off when it tries.