The film opens in a lovingly-evoked Depression-era New York City, where struggling actress Ann Darrow (a luminous Naomi Watts) finds herself out of a job. Shady director Carl Denham (played by Jack Black, who never seems comfortable in the role) convinces her to star in his new film, to be shot on location on a mysterious island. The next thing she knows, she’s aboard a rusty tramp steamer, bound for the Far East. Along the way, she falls in love with screenwriter Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody, he of the inexplicable jolie laide hotness), whom Denham has shanghaied onto the steamer as well.

The dialogue and characterization of the first third of the film allude to various classic films and musicals, without ever descending into pastiche or snide irony. The characters are all stylized to an extent, though Brody and especially Watts are able to register depths of feeling that go beyond type.

When the boat lands on Skull Island, however, the film switches gears and becomes suggestive less of Old Hollywood than of such action-adventure blockbusters as Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and Jackson’s own recent Lord of the Rings trilogy. A tribe of creepy savages (postcolonialists will have a field day with this film) captures Ann and sacrifices her to King Kong, who, instead of eating her at once, runs off into the jungle with her. Jack, Denham, and the crew of the amazingly well-armed steamer venture forth to save her, battling Kong, dinosaurs (!), and a host of disgusting giant insects along the way. For the most part, the action sequences are well-executed and thrilling, though there are a few absurd only-in-the-movies moments (if one of your friends had foot-long roaches crawling all over him, would you attempt to remove them with a machine gun?) and blatantly artificial CGI shots which dampen the mood some.

As the men are attempting to rescue her, Ann progresses from trying to escape Kong to building a relationship with him. It’s a testament both to Watts’s acting abilities and to the talents of the CGI programmers that these scenes, which could so easily become laughable—in one Ann and the gorilla watch a sunset together—are touching instead.

In the final act of the film, King Kong is captured and brought to New York so that, naturally, he can get loose, rampage the city, and climb the Empire State Building. This last sequence, like the middle third of the film, is action-heavy, and in it the homage to classic filmmaking drops away, along with any attempt at developing the themes of the movie. Jackson gestures towards profundity here—we’re supposed to see that Denham defiles Nature Untamed by making the great ape the centerpiece of a cheesy musical, and there’s some stuff about love and beauty civilizing the wild masculine force that is Kong, yadda, yadda, yadda—but his points seem merely tacked on. This tendency to drown seriousness in thrills and chills, along with its structural and pacing problems, is what keeps King Kong from being a great film; instead, it remains an entertaining blockbuster that’s better than it has any right to be. Nevertheless, it’s a lot of movie for your $7.50, and it’s definitely worth catching on the big screen.