★★★☆☆

115 min | PG-13 | April 12, 2024 | Warner Bros. Pictures

Godzilla and Kong team up to fight a bigger ape. The human characters exist to explain things. The monsters exist to destroy things. The film exists because the last one made money.

Godzilla is napping in the Colosseum. Kong is exploring the Hollow Earth and discovers a civilization of apes ruled by a tyrant called the Skar King. The Skar King controls a frost-breathing Titan and plans to invade the surface world. Godzilla and Kong must team up to stop him. The MonsterVerse has abandoned any pretense of the human stories mattering and that is both the film’s greatest strength and its most glaring weakness. The monsters are the movie now. The humans are just narrators.

Rebecca Hall returns as Ilene Andrews and she tries. Kaylee Hottle returns as Jia with a subplot about her Iwi heritage that connects to the Hollow Earth mythology. Brian Tyree Henry plays Bernie Hayes with conspiracy-theorist energy that provides comic relief. Dan Stevens joins as Trapper, a veterinarian with surfer-dude charm who exists to be likable. The actors do their jobs. The script gives them nothing beyond functional dialogue that moves the plot from one monster sequence to the next.

Adam Wingard returns to direct and he leans into the absurdity with full commitment. The Hollow Earth sequences are visually imaginative. The monster fights are staged with scale and impact. Kong gets a mechanical arm enhancement that is ridiculous and entertaining. Godzilla evolves into a pink-tinged form that looks cool and means nothing. The film moves fast enough that the logical gaps do not register until after the credits. The score is bombastic. The destruction is enormous.

This is a film that knows exactly what it is and delivers it without apology. The MonsterVerse has become a kaiju wrestling league with a thin human frame around it. If you want to watch giant monsters punch each other through pyramids, this delivers. If you want anything else, you are in the wrong theater. The bar for these films is low. This clears it.