Kong: Skull Island is a grand cinematic adventure powered by furry fury, as the horrors of war blend with chest-beating creature confidence.

This highly entertaining return of one of the cinema's most enduring giant beasts moves like crazy — the film feels more like 90 minutes than two hours — and achieves an ideal balance between wild action, throwaway humor, genre refreshment and, perhaps most impressively, a nonchalant awareness of its own modest importance in the bigger scheme of things.

A large part of the enjoyment comes down to the sheer earth-shaking lunacy of Kong’s daily grind, even before the human intruders are factored in.

In the struggle between sober subtext and monster-movie goofiness, the goofiness mostly wins out.

It lacks neither fun nor polish, but it has the square tidiness of a compartmentalized fast-food meal.