Sometimes, when you have a weak script, you cast above it and hope the actors can carry the movie regardless.

Then there is Kong: Skull Island which basically cast every actor in existence and said, "let them figure it out." And unfortunately, no matter how talented and charismatic each individual actor in this movie is, their dialogue is awful, and they're written as shallow cliches. And some are just wasted, notably Hiddleston and Larson whose jobs are to look pretty.

The bigger problem is the tone of this movie though, it shifts tonally so often it gave me whiplash and a headache. Then there's the sophomoric attempt to make a 'cool', 'stylish' Vietnam war production that is less authentic than the play Max Fischer throws in Rushmore. It just stinks of, "cool man", and in the worst, most obnoxious way, from the soundtrack to lines like "you were in the shit?" and "Da Nang". This was clearly made by somebody whose only knowledge of the Vietnam war stems from watching Apocalypse Now 20 times. Eh. At least the VFX were good and the Kong fight was pretty cool, although this is considerably worse than Peter Jackson's movie on almost every level otherwise (the one exception being this movie doesn't have a sequence as bad as the stampeding dinos).