May 20, 1998 | This ain’t no Barney, this ain’t no Toho, this ain’t no fooling around. Director Roland Emmerich and producor Dean Devlin, the same guys made millions with Independence Day, now go for even bigger bucks with Godzilla, their high-tech version of those cheesy Japanese B-movies starring various guys in assorted versions of a rubber dinosaur suit. No doubt about it: Their Gangsta Lizard is a leaner and meaner creature. Trouble is, the monster, like the movie itself, doesn’t have much of a heart.
This new and improved Godzilla is supposed to be an unfortunate side effect of French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. But when he finally makes himself fully visible in New York City, he resembles nothing so much as a mutant hybrid of the mother beast from Alien and a T-Rex from Jurassic Park. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just that, even though this slimmed-down, turbo-charged beast is able to move faster and lunge quicker while dashing through the streets of Manhattan, there’s something oddly generic about this computer-generated image.
A great deal of New York is pulverized during Godzilla, and if you feel Deep Impact didn’t give you enough Manhattan-bashing, you’ll get more than your money’s worth here. Trouble is, city demolishing simply isn’t as much fun when the demolishing isn’t done by a cranky, rubbery behemoth. Part of what made the Toho-produced Godzilla movies so much fun was Godzilla’s bad-ass, take-no-crap attitude as he lumbered through Tokyo, swatting buildings while laughing at bullets, bombs and heat-seeking missiles. By contrast, the Emmerich-Devlin Godzilla is a bit of a wuss. He usually runs way from his attackers, and causes most of his damage mostly by accident. Indeed, when the Chrysler Building gets whacked here, it’s because some army missiles miss their intended target (i.e., Godzilla) and zap the landmark instead.
As a scientist who tries to stop the monster mash, Matthew Broderick conveys a gee-whiz ingenuousness that gets very annoying very quickly. The acting honors go to Jean Reno (Mission: Impossible) as a crafty French secret service agent who leads an assault on Madison Square Garden, where Godzilla — fully in touch with his feminine side — lays 200 or so eggs. All of the eggs hatch, of course, leaving the door wide open for a new series of sequels.
