The biggest beefcake in Hollywood is back in King Kong, yanking the jawbones off careless dinosaurs, raging at the extras and smashing millions of dollars worth of spooky jungle into splinters. Clasped in his huge right fist is a blonde rag doll called Ann Darrow with a scream like a steam whistle. They are the most tragic pair of star-crossed lovers (certainly the most tuneless) since, well, Romeo and Juliet.

Kong is a savage and sensitive 25ft loner who doesn’t speak a word of English; Ann (Naomi Watts) is a half-naked New York flapper, grateful for the muscle on Skull Island. Destiny has rudely wrenched them together: she from the bright lights of the stage; he from the daily grind of biting the heads off giant vampire bats. They both appreciate a decent sunset, and their empathy brings tears to the eyes.

How can this be? The original King Kong fell off the Empire State Building like a sack of potatoes in 1933. He was a dull abomination with a beastly crush on the shapely Fay Wray. In Peter Jackson’s rip-roaring remake, Kong is the most terrifying of noble savages and the melancholic victim of pitiless civilisation. The director’s fairground genius makes the creaky moral rattle like the proverbial snake.

The chief culprit is Jack Black’s demented movie producer, Carl Denham, who hires a ship to escape his creditors and finish his bankrupt masterpiece on an uncharted island. He is the comic clone of Orson Welles: manipulative, obsessed with the big picture and ever handy with a bottle. The captain looks as balanced as Ahab, and once they’re embarked on his rusty tub to the heart of darkness, the omens go from bad to worse. The compasses stop working. The ship is tossed on to the gargoyle rocks surrounding Skull Island, and the crew is greeted by gibbering cannibals who skewer them with spears and beat their brains out with clubs.

King Kong is a visceral nightmare with scenery to match. Ancient crumbling ruins are littered with skeletons. Thumping tribal drums provide a rhythm for the pounding action. But nothing quite prepares you for the breathtaking kidnap and sacrifice of Ann, the first appearance of Kong and the extraordinary quest to get her back — a chase led by Adrien Brody’s infatuated scriptwriter, with the greedy Black (cameras rolling) in hot pursuit.

Jackson’s set pieces put every adventure film you’ve ever seen in the shade while poaching rides from the best. There’s a mind-boggling Jurassic Park stampede of brontosauruses along a crumbling cliff edge, complete with snapping raptors; an Indiana Jones encounter with giant creepy-crawlies; and feral natives who behave like orcs from The Lord of the Rings. The body count is alarmingly high. And the capturing of Kong looks as irresponsible as it is patently crazy.

The film, of course, is a humungous dollop of corn. The clever twist is the way that Jackson turns on the intrepid explorers of the SS Venture when they unveil their heavily shackled prize at the Alhambra Theatre in New York. We sail from a land of pure pagan barbarity back to the Great Depression and a morally grubby civilisation where the “eighth wonder” can be consumed for “the price of an admission ticket”. Which is the more hellish world? This is the barbed, black irony of the final tumultuous reel.

What separates Jackson’s Kong from any number of pretenders is Andy Serkis, the actor who played Gollum in the Rings trilogy. Upgrading the same technology he used to bring Gollum to life, the director “humanises” Kong, via Serkis, in a way that would have been impossible even two years ago. It’s a stunningly effective trick. Months of research in zoos and on safari in Rwanda gave Serkis a believable palette of simian behaviour. More importantly it gave Watts a character to work with. Brilliant CGI details paint the rest of the portrait: a snaggle fang, a broken tooth, rippling fur, scars from old battles.

Kong’s last night on the Manhattan tiles cues a memorable orgy of angry car-flinging mayhem. He scoops up blonde Ann Darrow lookalikes on the street and tosses them away like scrunched-up paper balls. As Euripides illustrated so eloquently in his tragedy The Bacchae, we tame myths at our peril — though admittedly he probably didn’t have an overgrown gorilla in mind. Jackson celebrates the myth of Kong like a Hollywood high priest. He mourns and we marvel. He pumps so much surreal sentiment into the ending that his film nearly bursts.

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