To be perfectly clear, Godzilla x Kong is 10 pounds of stupid in a 5 pound bag. Taken as a film for intellectual film snobs, it’s trash. Taken as a film that inhabits exactly what the kid in me who raced home after school to watch Monster Week on local tv felt, it’s perfection.

Godzilla x Kong is the 5th film in this American Monsterverse franchise. While the Japanese are gettin’ serious with Godzilla Minus One and Shin Godzilla, the American films lean heavily on the kind of Godzilla movies the Japanese were making in the ’70s. Zip zap zowee pulp full of guys in rubber suits and little regard for logic.

In this one, human civilization keeps chugging along as Godzilla protects the surface while Kong rules in Hollow Earth. But something has riled up Godzilla while Kong is on a spiritual quest (or something). Meanwhile, humans run around spouting nonsense in an attempt to make any of this make sense.

The first hour is pretty average… very dumb, very silly, but watchable and reasonably fun. There’s a whole lot of “huh?” and “Kong went where now?” head-scratchers… plus giant ape dentistry because why wouldn’t there be giant ape dentistry? That said, there’s a surprising shift away from the humans to the monsters (which they should have done in the previous flicks).

The film’s final act really woke up the kaiju in me. It’s a riotous outbreak of CGI noise and backsplash as at least four kaiju square off in a hand-waving zero gravity brawl… and it’s pretty cool. It’s a startling amount of chaos that is somehow coherent while making no damn sense at all.

It ends in the middle of a city with a kick-ass kaiju throwdown that, yeah, made me feel like I was ten years old watching a 70s era Godzilla tag-team multi-monster cage match. Did a zillion humans die in the fight? Probably. Was it on a ridiculous scale with questionable physics? Absolutely. But it was so much damn fun I had to fully surrender.

And, hell, I even felt a gentle tug on my heart when a decision is made between the human characters at the end. Maybe it was the high of a surprisingly good monster brawl, but it worked.

So, yeah, this is the best of the American Monsterverse films… and I didn’t see it coming. It’s dumb as a box of rocks and if you take any of it seriously, you’ve walked into the wrong theater. But it brought me back home to that tiny 12 inch tv that barely got the signal from the local UHF station playing the monster movie marathon.

Score: 86