Starring: Naomi Watts, Jack Black (I), Adrien Brody

8 out of 10 stars: Though not perfect, King Kong is a grand entertainment. Once the big ape shows up it is a nonstop adventure, jam-packed with action and the best realization of a prehistoric world captured on film to date. It's a movie that, like another one of director Peter Jackson's best efforts, Forgotten Silver, is hopelessly, helplessly in love with old movies even while it creates something new for us so that we can see them afresh.

Jackson has stated that the original 1933 King Kong inspired him to be a filmmaker as a child and it's with childlike glee that he has tackled this project. The Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack version, with stop-animation by Willis O'Brien, was so accomplished that subsequent sequels and imitators, with bigger budgets and better technology, looked feeble in comparison.

Not so this Kong. The creature is stunning. Not only does he impress as being as real as the flesh-and-blood counterparts all around him, he impresses as being more real (and certainly more interesting) than they are. Along with impressive sets and vistas like Skull Island, everything is bigger and better in Peter Jackson's King Kong.

But, grand entertainment or not, the first forty-five minutes of King Kong has to be taken to task. Populated by people, it is largely lacking in charm and personality, making for a long interval before the arrival of the big simian.

We meet Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), a down-on-her-luck vaudeville comedienne who is given the chance of a lifetime by the shifty Carl Denham (Jack Black), a desperate filmmaker who will risk anything for fame and fortune. He promises her a starring role (she can replace his lead actress because she fits her dress size) in his upcoming jungle picture, but she has to get aboard a departing tramp steamer, the Venture, to do it. She's tantalized by the chance to meet Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody), an F. Scott Fitzgerald screenwriter type, who is old pals with Denham and is doing a job-for-hire retouching his adventure epic. Denham, meanwhile, is being sought by his creditors and the police, making their immediate departure all the more urgent.

Jackson lays the portent on a little thick in this initial section. Jack Black's eyes roam around as if he's in Madame X's House of Voodoo and someone is continually dealing him the Death card. Everyone is saying things that are a little bit ominous, when they're not outright predicting the coming intervention of Fate. The gangplank of the Venture is only missing a soothsayer cackling about the Ides of March.

But board the Venture they do, leading to the weakest section of the film. Driscoll has been tricked by Denham into staying on board (a painfully unbelievable sequence) as the ship pulls away from dock. Darrow, meanwhile, primps and preens in preparation for meeting the great writer. When they do meet, it's Jackson's attempt to do the "Golden Era of Movies" mistaken-identity-formula, though none of it is done very cleverly.

Also on the voyage is Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler), Denham's leading man for the picture, Captain Englehorn (Thomas Kretschmann), who takes pride in his capture of wild animals, the Venture's first mate Hayes (a very sturdy Evan Parke), Lumpy, the cook (Andy Serkis), who is also Kong), and Jimmy (Jamie Bell), a cabin boy.

Jimmy preoccupies a lot of screen time in King Kong and I'm perplexed as to why. Hayes says that he found him stowed away in the hold of the Venture, more wild than the animals that they were transporting. Unless something was excised later (and at three hours and seven minutes one begins to wonder what, indeed, that could be) Jimmy evinces absolutely none of this. In fact, he's so feral he's busy reading Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." Yet everyone spends their time, particularly Hayes, worrying that Jimmy will be the one person that gets back alive.

That any of them will return appears highly unlikely once the ship gets to Skull Island. (Oops, hang on, let's do this the Peter Jackson way: you know, the herky-jerky, pretty annoying, slo-mo Uruk-Hai scenes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy? When Jack Driscoll types "skull" on the screenplay he's writing for the film they're going to shoot Jackson ZOOMS IN IN SLOW MOTION ON THE KEYS with the herky-jerky cam! "S!"-"K!"-"U!"-"L!"-"L!"). The ship runs aground, wedged against some rocks, and Denham takes an expedition ashore, including Jack and Ann. They discover a gigantic running wall that separates what appears to be a deserted village with the arboreal headland.

The landing party quickly runs into a tribe of natives that seem to have been infected by the dreaded "rat monkey" from Jackson's Dead Alive. They act like a demented band of zombies and one wonders who built the wall, the tribe, or Kong and the dinosaurs. The Rat Monkey tribe has hideous piercings, they like to roll their eyes into the back of their heads, and they like blondes.

So too does the master of Skull Island, a big silverback gorilla named Kong, the last of his kind (poignantly alluded to by the giant primate skulls in his lair). The moment Kong grabs Ann and takes her deep into the jungle, the film kicks into another gear. Kong not only provides most the action, he provides the personality the film has been lacking.

A rescue party, led by Hayes, heads in after them, giving plenty of opportunity for Skull Island's other indigenous inhabitants, mostly dinosaurs (and a couple of bugs) to pick off the mostly unnamed landing party. A stampeding herd of brachiosaurs is moderately silly while, what on paper is an even more preposterous scene, involving a battle between Kong and three Tyranosaurus Rexes, in entirely involving. Jackson's counterpart to the famous, excised Spider Cave sequence is unnerving, including gigantic leeches that envelop poor Lumpy.

Ann, in an effort to save her own skin, tries out her vaudeville routines on Kong. Kong obviously likes her more than the Rat Monkey women he's been getting and he settles down. Thus begins the unlikely pairing that makes this film: Naomi Watts reacting to nothing and a raft of CGI animators crafting Kong; it's true movie magic.

Kong is so much more, however, than he ever has been. Instead of an icon Jackson and his fellow filmmakers have created a character, a great character, one that supersedes his predecessors. The ape is brutal, vicious, impetuous, and surly. When Ann refuses to perform any more of her act he rages, petulantly ripping up rocks and trees. We may not understand the motivation of a well-meaning playwright, struggling actress, or a desperate director, but we get the ape.

We also know that things aren't going to turn out well for Ann and Kong, though they do turn out well for the audience. The inevitable third act, where Kong is brought back to New York, has a fresh, "oh, that's how they're going to do that" feeling. When Ann and Kong's paths do cross again the meeting is sweet, set upon a frozen pond in Central Park, with tragedy looming in the background.

I have gotten callous in my old age because, unlike the 1976 version, when I was eleven, I did not mist up this time Kong meets his fate with the bi-planes.

I don't take that as a failing on Peter Jackson's part but on mine. He was able to find that kid inside, whose heart broke when Kong fell off that building. It seems that I could not.