Godzilla stomps through a chaotic movie

A surfeit of creatures can't make King of the Monsters into something to care about..

Loud, chaotic and repetitive, Godzilla: King of the Monsters suffers from a script that puts three creatures into a monster traffic jam that jars any hope of coherent storytelling off its moorings.

The monsters, in no special order, are Mothra, Godan, and Godzilla. As it turns out, these titans (as they're referred to in the movie) offer the last hope for saving the Earth, which has been ravaged by humans. But before the monsters can launch their world-saving, environmentalist mission, another monster must be vanquished, a three-headed dragon called Ghidorah.

The humans in the movies take sides -- sort of. One side -- led by Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler), a father who sank into dereliction after the death of his son in the previous installment, wants to kill the monsters. The other side is led by Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), Mark's ex-wife. She wants to employ the monsters to save a world in which humans teeter on the edge of extinction.

To achieve her goal, Emma has thrown in with Jonah Alan (Charles Dance), a military man who has become an eco-terrorist; he's willing to pay a large price to save the world.

Madison Russell (Mille Bobby Brown), daughter of Mark and Emma, vacillates between the two approaches, as the movie bounces off one destructive set piece after another, none of them benefiting from anything resembling a well-staged buildup.

Other actors include Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Thomas Middleditch and David Straitharn, all of whom are swallowed -- not by monsters -- but by a screenplay that seems to have been eaten by the monsters, spit out as indigestible and then reassembled in ways that allow for dialogue that might have been fun had anyone bothered to deliver it with anything resembling a campy spirit.

As a result, Godzilla: King of the Monsters amounts to a collection of entirely forgettable performances.

The movie's big brain lodges in Farmiga's character: Dr. Russell is working on ORCA, a tacky looking electronic gizmo that can be used to communicate with the monsters by employing sonar or some such. If she's able to find the correct frequency she can calm the monsters, soothing their fire-breathing spirits.

The movie's high points all involve the mammoth creatures. The birth of Mothra, for example, reveals her glowing, elegant wings. Say what you will about Rodan, he knows how to make an entrance: He blasts out of a volcano.

Impressive in size, Godzilla doesn't have a particularly expressive countenance, and Ghidorah's three heads might productively have spent time talking to one another. Maybe they could have brought some much-needed coherence to a project that loads up on action involving battling monsters. These fights, splayed across ravished urban landscapes, aren't especially distinguished, but they're really all this Michael Dougherty-directed movie has to offer.

For some, that may be enough. Warner Brothers has more of these monster mashes on the way. Maybe next time, they'll add some things that this one seems to lack, human characters about whom we might actually care and action that raises the pulse instead of drubbing us into indifference. Look, they're fighting again. Sigh.

'Bel Canto' sings a dull tune

For a hostage drama, this Paul Weitz-directed offering proves awfully slack.

Bel Canto is a seriously intended movie that I found impossible to take seriously. Adapted from a 2001 novel by Ann Patchett, Bel Canto tells the story of a celebrated opera singer (Julianne Moore) who visits an unnamed Latin American country to give a private concert. Instead of dispensing with a quick-hit engagement, the singer winds up being held hostage -- along with her affluent audience -- by a band of guerrillas. The country's vice president arranged the concert in hopes of impressing a visiting Japanese industrialist (Ken Watanabe). Watanabe's Hosokawa, an avid opera lover, accepted the invitation even though he had no intention of building the factory for which the vice president had been angling. For its part, the invading band of guerrillas wants the country's president to release all political prisoners. Moore lip-synchs (Renee Fleming did the actual singing), and the hostages and their captors slowly begin to bond as it's revealed that the insurgents are ... well ... not all that bad. Because Hosokawa is obsessed with Moore's character's voice, the leap from the love of music to the love of the singer proves a short one. In a more unlikely romance, one of the rebels (Maria Mercedes Coroy) falls for Hosokawa's multi-lingual translator (Ryo Kase). Sebastian Koch portrays a Red Cross negotiator who's reluctantly thrown into the mix. Once everyone is trapped in the veep's luxurious home, the movie begins to suffer from a claustrophobia that director Paul Weitz can't defeat. What surely should have been tense becomes slack, a limp attempt to sing the praises of art as a means of unifying disparate (and desperate) souls. When the hostages and their captors wind up in an impromptu soccer game before the movie's violent finale, all I could think was that it takes more daring than was available here to save this movie from looking like a cross-cultural summer camp.

'Godzilla' stomps into theaters

A monster movie that provides the right kick.

The new Godzilla -- though far superior to Roland Emmerich's 1998 edition -- offers plenty of room for criticism and carping.

Let's get that out of the way first.

-- As an engineer working in a Japanese nuclear plant, Bryan Cranston seems so agitated you half wonder whether his character has been doing some of Walter White's meth.

-- Juliette Binoche is in the movie, but doesn't make it much past the first reel.

-- The movie's human hero (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) seems so generic, he might have wandered in from the set of another action movie.

-- Wisdom? Only if you think the 1954 original can help you unlock the key to successful living. The biggest lesson you can take from Godzilla is an admonition: Don't get crushed.

Problems, yes, but damned if Godzilla isn't full of monumental fun, a major helping of B-movie entertainment that's presented with so much seriousness, it can't possibly be taken seriously.

Credit director Gareth Edwards with understanding B-movie tropes, as well as with a willingness to trash several American cities in a movie that builds (or rather stomps) toward a climactic battle in which Godzilla takes on two hideous-looking creatures known as Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms -- MUTOs for short.

Think of them as skyscraper-sized bugs.

Sure Godzilla could be more careful about where he puts his feet down, but we feel more empathy for the Big Guy than for most of the humans in the film. And let's face it, some of the people are simply there to be squashed, human sacrifices en route to what's bound to be a box office epiphany.

The movie opens in 1999 with Cranston's Joe Brody working in a Japanese nuclear facility that's threatened by increased seismic activity. Disaster hits, and Joe suffers a big loss.

Fifteen years later, Joe -- fueled by grief and obsession -- still lives in Japan. He believes a massive coverup is concealing the true cause of the nuclear meltdown.

Brody's grown son (Taylor-Johnson) -- now a Naval officer -- leaves his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and young son to travel to Japan. He hopes to help his "nut-case" father who has been arrested for entering the quarantine zone that was ravaged when the nuclear plant blew.

Young Brody soon learns that his father is right in his suspicions.

Edwards (Monsters) doesn't so much tell a story as he hammers together bits of narrative, but he hammers loudly and with resolve, creating a suspenseful atmosphere until he unleashes the wanton destruction that gives the movie its real kick.

Two schools of thought emerge about how to deal with the rampaging monsters. David Straithairn plays an admiral who thinks that the solution may involve luring the creatures out to sea and going nuclear on them.

Ken Watanabe plays a scientist who opposes the military solution. He seems to have a strange concern for Godzilla.

Noisy, senseless and fun, Godzilla saves most of its gargantuan thrills for its finale.

A special nod to Alexander Desplat, whose score ripples through the proceedings like an eerie warning of terrors to come, sometimes sugesting more than the movie's able to deliver.

Not surprisingly, Edwards leaves the door open for a sequel, but he seems to know what's essential about the 60-year-old franchise. He works with enough brio to satisfy genre fans while underplaying grand thematic pronouncements about humanity's fatal arrogance.

That's probably a good thing.