Kong: Skull Island opens in 1944, with an American pilot and a Japanese pilot trying to kill each other on a Pacific island until a giant ape interrupts. It is a confident, slightly daft start, and Jordan Vogt-Roberts never quite matches it. The film then jumps to 1973, where Bill Randa, played by John Goodman, has talked the government into an expedition to an uncharted island. He recruits a U.S. Army unit under Samuel L. Jackson’s Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard, a tracker named Conrad and a photographer named Weaver. The seismic charges they drop to survey the island bring the ape down on them. The survivors are scattered.

I liked that the film skips the familiar King Kong story. There is no damsel and no trip to New York, and the Empire State Building never appears. What we get is a Vietnam-era adventure with monsters in it. That is a decent idea, and the cast throws itself at it. The execution is another matter.

Tom Hiddleston is Captain James Conrad, a former British SAS officer turned tracker, and he plays him with easy authority. It is a solid, likeable performance in a role that asks for little beyond looking capable. Brie Larson‘s Mason Weaver, an anti-war photographer, is the closest thing the film has to a conscience, though the script rarely lets her do more than watch and react. Jackson is the loudest presence on screen, and Packard is played big enough that the character sometimes tips into caricature. Goodman’s Randa and Toby Kebbell’s Chapman do their jobs and no more. Kebbell also supplies the motion capture for Kong, which is a nice piece of trivia and about all the part offers. Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, John Ortiz and Jing Tian are each handed a single note and left to hold it. The one true find is John C. Reilly as Hank Marlow, the pilot who has been stranded on the island since the war. He is funny and a little sad, and he supplies the film’s only real warmth.

The monsters are the reason to buy a ticket. Kong’s first attack has real force, and the big ape is drawn with weight and personality. He guards the island, and the film explains that he is the last of his kind, his species wiped out by subterranean reptiles called Skullcrawlers. Those creatures were woken by the very bombs Packard’s men were dropping. The scale of it all is impressive. The Skullcrawlers themselves, though, are forgettable: a lesser version of the star, all teeth and no character.

The middle stretch sags. The expedition splits into groups, and the story splits with it. One party goes after Chapman, who has been cut off from the rest; another heads for an extraction point and runs into the Iwi natives and Marlow. Each thread is fine on its own, but the film keeps losing momentum whenever it has to cut from one to the other, and it never finds a way to make the two feel like one story. The dialogue is blunt and the exposition arrives in big lumps.

The tone is the biggest problem. Vogt-Roberts moves from grim fatalism to open comedy within a single scene. When a character is devoured, the film gives no cue whether to wince or laugh, and I did neither. The same shrug hangs over its gestures toward war, colonial arrogance and nature’s revenge, which are mentioned and then dropped in favour of the next monster. They feel like set dressing.

Still, the jungle looks wonderful. The rain and the sheer size of the creatures give the film a physical texture that many effects pictures lack, and it is no surprise that its visual effects earned an Oscar nomination. Nobody will remember the plot that carries the film from one set piece to the next.

This is a loud, silly, handsome creature feature that wants to be taken seriously and keeps undercutting itself. I enjoyed the ape, the island and Reilly, and I would gladly have traded much of the rest for another ten minutes with any of them.