Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: the MonsterVerse is a thing! Once enough time had passed since Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla and Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the blockbuster peddlers at Legendary Pictures decided America was ready once again for rude giant animals to crush everything in their paths and possibly dominate theaters. Their Avengers-style interconnected saga began with 2014’s recycle-titled Godzilla, which delivered one truly mighty monster melee after two hours of ordinary humans reminding us what we didn’t like about the previous five decades’ predecessors. Pop culture’s most popular overtall simian returned in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, a period-piece prequel that shamelessly embraced kaiju camp, OD’d on steroids and let its creatures run amuck through Apocalypse Now backdrops and chase some of the best character actors in the biz. The humans were suspiciously more entertaining and having way more fun than usual, as monster toe-jam ingredients go.

On the opposite end of the dramatic spectrum came Michael Dougherty’s 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which was even more artistically ambitious in its apocalyptic visions of super-powered creatures looming dozens of stories above us, moving gracefully through our fragile environs with an awe-striking, hypernatural majesty like an amazing colossal episode of the BBC’s Planet Earth. As a bonus, some among the human ensemble brought a more credible dramatic heft, as if to claim their lives weren’t totally irrelevant and maybe-just-maybe all this mayhem could, like, mean something. Then came the pandemic, when everyone craved mindless escapism and other release valves from the pressures of the times — a perfect stage for the fan-service crossover throwdown that was Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong. It offered no grandeur, no pretensions, nary a memorable human moment (can you remember Alexander Skarsgård’s best scene? TRICK QUESTION, THERE WASN’T ONE), just three really big toys (maybe more than that? who cares) improbably wielding weapons and pro wrestling moves like a Robot Chicken parody of monster movies. It served popcorn fun with margarine and light salt, but stepped noticeably in a direction away from its forebears, which had dared to aspire more loftily, perhaps in vain.

As an intermission between movies came Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+, a ten-episode midquel that connected the backstories of nearly all previously installments with an arguably superfluous yet intriguingly fleshed-out origin for Monarch, the monolithic shadow organization dedicated to monitoring and mitigating kaiju movements worldwide. It delved into Godzilla’s early years, it revealed a bit about Monarch’s GvK rival Apex Industries, and it rooted everything in the family history of John Goodman’s Skull Island scientist, who didn’t seem that important at the time. As played in his younger years by Workaholics‘ Anders Holm, Dr. Bill Randa suddenly became the crux of humanity’s last, best defense against natural selection. Its strong cast also included Shogun‘s Anna Sawai, Pachinko‘s Mari Yamamoto, and the year’s cleverest casting coup — Falcon and the Winter Soldier‘s Wyatt Russell as a well-intentioned but sometimes shortsighted yes-man who grew up to become his dad Kurt Russell’s gruffer, shorter-tempered, world-weary rebel who no longer takes orders from anyone, even when he really ought to stop and listen. The TV-budgeted kaiju usage was spectacular if reduced in screen time, but for just the one occasion, all those tiny fragile humans were the most interesting part and there’s an actual “legacy” that’s quite the burden.

All of this, then, is why I could feel my enthusiasm leaking out my ears as the MonsterVerse took three city-length steps backward into rote MONSTERS FIGHT same-old-same-old in Wingard’s team-up sequel, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Abetted by three writers — the returning Terry Rossio (Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean, Emmerich’s Godzilla) as well as Wingard’s old pal Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest) and Jeremy Slater (Moon Knight, Fantastic Four), he’s transparently way more interested in the film’s tallest, loudest, flashiest, least verbal, most merchandisable stars. If you can crank out a $135 million-plus B-movie without trying, why bother aiming for an A-movie?

To that end, GxK has the series’ smallest, most underserved ensemble yet. Only three survivors return from GvK, led by Rebecca Hall as Dr. Ilene Andrews, obligatory scientist now thrust into the role of Lead Human rather than some stoic male’s exposition-droning sidekick. That’s still her job, but now she has seniority. While juggling her Monarch workload, she’s still raising her adopted daughter, Skull Island refugee Jia (Kaylee Hottle). The Iwi teen has aged real-time and grapples with the unique angst of being not just a high school loner, but the lone survivor of her tribe.

When Monarch’s sensors pick up a confusing signal from within the Hollow Earth — Earth-MonsterVerse’s underground panorama gallery with its own breathable blue skies in lieu of magma, lava, or anything we learned from The Core — she has no real kaijuologist colleagues to consult, no kaiju research library to study. She turns to what passes for a fellow “expert” — Atlanta‘s Brian Tyree Henry once again as kaiju-conspiracy podcaster Bernie Hayes. Their GvK storylines didn’t overlap, but now she turns to him because, absent scientific documentation, she needs his somewhat validated crackpot theories, his sequel-survival luck, and his comic relief. He has no certified skills, but he’s got spunk! And a blog!

You can’t have a certified monster movie with a cast of three, so the call goes out to Dan Stevens, erstwhile star of Downton Abbey and Wingard’s own The Guest. Now he’s a devil-may-care adventurer with the G.I. Joe code-name Trapper. His action-hero’s skill sets include mega-veterinary kaiju care, sci-fi vessel piloting, backup comic relief and cocky grinning. To be fair, Trapper is a marginally more believable Steve Irwin fantasy descendant than Chris Pratt’s Jurassic dino-tamer. Add in one (1) obligatory soldier for quote-unquote “security” (Alex Ferns, Chernobyl‘s naked head miner and Andor‘s Sgt. Mosk), and now they have enough humans to return to the Hollow Earth, fumble around and find out. (For any Monarch fans who might wonder whether the company solved the time-dilation travel issue: this never, ever comes up. Hurray, they cured it offscreen!)

Before long they’re back in the Hollow Earth’s untamed wilds that sometimes have a ceiling and sometimes don’t. The signal’s trail leads them to a wrecked Monarch station, then still deeper to the town of another long-lost Iwi tribe. How the Iwi had tribes above and below, or how these seemingly simple folk traversed the nigh-impassable portals that they’ve established cannot be done so easily by puny humans, is a mystery never contemplated. But we do know these Iwi are telepathic, and it was their psychic SOS that Monarch’s sensors picked up, because of course Monarch calibrates their supercomputers for that, in case Professor X or any Betazoids show up for a crossover.

Just why the Iwi were sending out an SOS is likewise fuzzy. Granted, they’re currently hosting the rebirth of one of Godzilla’s old pals, but there’s no Iwi kaiju-obstetrician concerned about complications in its cocoon. In case it might become relevant, Dr. Andrews does spend time interpreting some Iwi hieroglyphs that tell the story of a long-imprisoned tyrant monster called Skar King (yep, the hieroglyphs spell it with a kewl-kids’ K) who might one day return to wreak havoc and whatnot, but he’s not right there threatening them. The Monarch station ruins do bear oversized red claw marks that might’ve been his, but that wasn’t Iwi turf, so would they even care? If the Iwi ever interacted with the station, wouldn’t someone at the station have sent word to the Lead Human with an Iwi kid in her house?

Anyway! Never mind! Enough about humans! Yes, there are monsters afoot, mostly Kong. He’s still gamboling around the Hollow Earth like any given gorilla in a jungle. He’s still on friendly terms with Monarch and knows how to lope casually through a portal to beseech them for help up on the surface, as in his early scenes when an abscessed tooth is absolutely killing him. (I’ve been there. Giant apes: they’re just like us!) After Monarch provides him with millions of dollars’ worth of free dental work (the least they can give him in exchange for helping stop Mechagodzilla in the last flick, I guess), he returns below, messes around with a few other denizens, and somehow trips his way into an even more subterranean section of the Hollow Earth — the domain of the just-now-dreaded Skar King! Who sometimes has a “the” and sometimes doesn’t. Scholars might debate whether the Iwi hieroglyphs contained precise articles.

Those hieroglyphs claimed Skar King was imprisoned in, uh, the Even Hollower Earth by Godzilla himself after their last major battle long ago. (Did Godzilla bury him down there? Build some jail walls? Snap a house-arrest collar on his ankle?) Ever since, the Skar King has continued ruling Monkey Mordor in hopes of one day freeing himself and his minions from this ostensible prison, which he apparently did considering all the forensic evidence in the Monarch ruins. Nevertheless, he’s still master of his domain, ruling said minions and forcing them into slave labor that mostly entails them pushing dirt around or just pacing back and forth, all in the name of his secret scheme. Then Kong literally falls into his territory like Jack Tripper stumbling over a sofa, they fight and fight and fight, and Skar King’s secret scheme moves on from the “everyone look busy for centuries” step to the next step: randomly rise up and go destroy the surface world! As revenge for Kong’s trespassing! By busting through exactly zero defenses that any giant lizard built to keep them “imprisoned”!

Unfortunately for Kong, the Skar King has a secret weapon: an enslaved stegosaurus with icy breath that the hieroglyphs call Shimo, which is a Japanese word for “frost”. (Those are some extraordinarily linguistically comprehensive hieroglyphs.) Kong can’t fight a monster emperor and a giant blizzard-lizard and a half-hearted ape slave army and a giant tiny ape toyetically nicknamed Mini Kong on sale in your nearest big-box store today. Fortunately for Our Hero, Monarch thought it was a brilliant idea to begin inventing a kaiju-sized weaponized exoskeleton. They didn’t finish the entire suit, so Kong doesn’t quite enter into the final battle looking like Ripley at the end of Aliens (somewhere out there is a frustrated visionary Monarch scientist who applied for billions in funding to create exactly that) but there’re just enough finished parts to meet his final-battle upgrade needs.

Meanwhile back on the surface, Godzilla has a scene about every 20-25 minutes, per his contract, as he embarks on a world tour to unwitting audiences. Just as Superman has a long list of powers, including really goofy additions in some of his films, so does the King of Monsters. This time the plot needs him to exhibit the powers of monster-mind-reading across international distances and action precognition! He can see the future, kinda, just like Madame Web! And somehow his Minority Report seer-skill has fed him one of pop culture’s biggest cliches of this century, A War Is Coming, so he’s using the top-secret kaiju tunnels (established canon in previous films, to be fair) to zip hither and yon ’round the planet to charge himself up with radiation in preparation for that promised Final Battle. See Godzilla in Rome slapping Scylla, one of the subjects that bowed to him in King of the Monsters! See Godzilla eat a French nuclear power plant like it’s a culinary delicacy! See Godzilla basically teleport to the Arctic Circle to take on Tiamat, sadly not the Dungeons & Dragons version! See Godzilla rack up those James Bond frequent-traveler points!

Honestly, it wouldn’t have been that hard to write Godzilla out altogether, but the people demand their crossover sequel. Of course there’s eventually a rematch between the titular Titans, of course it’s all a big misunderstanding like how comic-book superhero team-ups traditionally begin, and of course they settle their differences and unite against their common enemy: The Skar King and his pet dino-snowblower whose internal organic freeze-ray generator somehow didn’t overwhelm its presumably cold-blooded reptilian nature and kill it upon first use! See Godzilla and Kong together again as they use one last video-game fast-travel tunnel from Cairo to Rio de Janeiro for that Final Boss Battle! (For those concerned, Christ the Redeemer has a cameo but seems spared from the ensuing billions in Brazilian property damage. No way does a film scheduled to open Easter weekend get permission to pulverize super-sized real-life Jesus iconography into monster foot-dust.)

I wish I could say the Final Battle was the greatest monster battle in all of cinema. I wish I could say GxK had memorable moments unlike any other. Skar King’s intimidating spine-whip is kindasorta different, as kaiju accessories go, but by the second half the whoa factor was ebbing away. It didn’t help that over half the film had been Kong’s Hollow Earth adventures among other animals of similar stature — no dialogue for long stretches (like, say, the recent and nearly silent Robot Dreams) and no humans standing next to him as points of reference. Without tiny creatures around for him to loom over in comparison, all his Wild Kingdom footage just feels like pre-virus Planet of the Apes shenanigans, none of the breathless big-screen awe that Kong’s best films can inspire. So many of the widescreen CG backdrops are ordinarily pretty CG, no more or less thrilling than the mostly disappointing Jurassic World trilogy. And, as noted above, the human parts don’t add up to much, apart from the dueling comedy stylings of Stevens and Henry, volleying exaggerated reactions at each other and at the Viewers at Home, infrequently amusing but more often feeling like the Wayne’s World Get-a-Load-of-This-Guy Cam.

Maybe not every monster movie has to mean something, but considering how needlessly thoughtful some of the previous MonsterVerse installments were, it’s a shame the makers of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire felt unmotivated to keep up with them. Even in our IMAX showing, everything felt like…well, like such an ordinary blockbuster. That should be an oxymoron, right? But consider another kaiju spectacle of recent vintage: Takashi Yamazaki’s Academy Award-winning Godzilla Minus One. It’s set outside the American MonsterVerse, but in its scathing critique of Japan’s postwar government and its advocacy for the furious citizenry who felt betrayed by the warmongers that led them into disaster, which just so happens to have a giant lizard in it, it demonstrates on a lower budget that popcorn flicks can meld brains with brawn, and that heart and soul mean so much more than mere mindless punching.

If you can make a B-movie without trying, why not go for an A-movie?

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Other Monarch employees include Rachel House (Moana, Thor: Ragnarok, season 2 of Foundation) and Ron Smyck (Spiderhead). Fala Chen (Shang-Chi‘s mom) is the queen of the Iwi telepaths. Blink and you’ll miss Anthony Brandon Wong (Ghost from The Matrix series) as a TV talking head.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire end credits, but they provide the short list of all the classic-rock hits foisted upon the film by 70something studio execs who always insist on such prompts in lieu of a rousing score. Given the choice, I would not have fed any coins into this movie’s tired kaijukebox.