Godzilla has always been a tad pear-shaped,  but this time around, he’s sporting a pretty sizable gut.  When seen in profile stomping through the wreckage of a burning city, all he needs is a wife-beater t-shirt, and you’ve got a giant reptilian Jake Lamotta gone to seed, blindly driven by haywire machismo, lashing out at any and everything around him.

The first in a trio of monsters to go up against Godzilla is Baragon, a ridiculous looking creature with a horn on his nose and goofy floppy ears.  Aside from the ability to burrow underground, there’s not much that separates him from any other giant monster.  To be fair, the silly creature might have other abilities, but who’s ever going to know?  Baragon plays Joey Lamotta to Godzilla’s Jake, and immediately gets the crap beat out of him, never to be seen again.

King Ghidorah, on the other hand, is supposed to be something different.  The beneficiary of some ancient PR provided by prophets in legend and lore down through the ages, Ghidorah finds himself in the unexpected position of having to live up to a possibly over-hyped rep.  Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Ghidorah is gigantic!  And he can fly!  And he’s got three heads!  And crackling energy bolts blast from each and every one of his mouths!

And he’s one of the Guardian Monsters!

That’s got to count for something.  Not every monster can lay claim to that title.  As a matter of fact, only three come to mind.  But now that I think about it, Baragon was one of them and Mothra the other.  Maybe it’s not such a big deal after all.

Forget I even mentioned it.

Preoccupied with thoughts like “Just what the hell is Ghidorah the King of?” and trying to decide whether the over-hyped  monster is a has-been or never-was, it comes as something of a surprise to realize that the three-headed flash in the pan is dead.  Killed by Godzilla.

Next up is Mothra, and guess what — Godzilla kills Mothra also, kind of leaving the story with nowhere to go.  Unaccountably, the expiring moth explodes in a Disney-esque burst of shimmering lights.  Then Mothra’s sparkling, iridescent life force envelopes Ghidorah, reanimating and bringing the fallen Guardian back to life.

Presented with a second chance to deliver on all the inflated claims made about him, Ghidorah rises from the ashes like a gigantic, golden, three-headed phoenix, ready to do battle with Godzilla one more time and…

And not surprisingly, Godzilla kills him again.

Really.

At this point, the film is dangerously close to jumping genres and turning into Groundhog Day for giant monsters as, believe it or not, Ghidorah is resurrected yet again (by the thousands of souls contained in  some ancient crockery) only to be killed a third time.

Fortunately for everyone involved, the third time is indeed a charm, and Ghidorah remains dead, or at least has the good sense to play possum and refuse to be humilitated in yet another terminal battle with Godzilla.

This movie has a lot of problems, and predictable, one-sided monster rumbles are only the beginning.  There’s also a bunch of needless mumbo-jumbo about Godzilla being the personification of the pain and death caused by Japan in the Pacific during WWII.

Trust me, this film hasn’t got enough going for it to worry about a second overlay of meaning.  Take care of business first and stage some surprising, fun monster battles before you start dragging in your high falutin’ metaphors.

Finally, the special effects are an uneasy hybrid of guys in monster suits and CGI.  Later in this final series of Godzilla films, the mix between miniature sets, rubber    monsters, and CGI gets pretty good, but here, instead of creating it’s own sort of oddball reality, it just comes off as too ambitious at best, and intermittently cheesy and lame at worst.

Make no mistake about it, Godzilla is definitely kicking monster butt in this film, but (and who would have guessed?) it turns out you need more than that.  I’m out!