Deep in the distant jungle … the undergrowth stirs, the lagoons froth, the branches shake and a huge monster rears terrifyingly up on its haunches, blotting out the sun. Run for your lives! It’s a 700 ft turkey, making squawking and gobbling noises and preparing to lay a gigantic egg.

This fantastically muddled and exasperatingly dull quasi-update of the King Kong story looks like a zestless mashup of Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now and a few exotic visual borrowings from Miss Saigon. It gets nowhere near the elemental power of the original King Kong or indeed Peter Jackson’s game remake; it’s something Ed Wood Jr might have made with a trillion dollars to do what he liked with but minus the fun. The film gives away the ape’s physical appearance far too early, thus blowing the suspense, the narrative focus is all over the place and the talented Tom Hiddleston is frankly off his game. Given no support in terms of script and direction, he looks stiff and unrelaxed and delivers lines with an edge of panic, like Michael Caine in The Swarm.

This is a Kong deprived of his kingship and his mystery, and even the title is a jumble, unsure of whether it’s the ape that’s the star or maybe the island itself, seething with loads of huge animals, scaring the borrower-sized humans who have rashly dared enter this domain. It comes to us from director Jordan Vogt-Roberts – known for his comedy before this – and screenwriters Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly and John Gatins. The script here feels like the umpteenth rewrite with almost all the humour and nuance chucked out to make sure it plays in non-English-language territories.

The time is the early 70s, just after the fall of Saigon, perhaps the latest plausible period in which technology would not have instantly alerted humanity to a primate of this size. Brainy scientists Bill Panda (John Goodman) and Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) get government funding for a top-secret mission to go to the remote Skull Island somewhere in south east Asia to investigate the rumoured big creature. They ask for military help and get it from bored soldier Lt Col Preston Packard (Samuel L Jackson) and his guys, eager for a redemptive challenge after the fiasco of Vietnam. “This is one war we’re not gonna lose!” Packard hollers, but hoists the white flag almost at once in the war against silliness and boredom.

Gung-ho adventures ... Kong. Photograph: Chuck Zlotnick/Warner Bros

On the civilian front, Mason Weaver (Brie Larson) is a tough, sexy “photojournalist” (a job that exists in the movies, not so much in real life) who senses the story of a lifetime, and Bill has also hired a tracker: former British special forces guy James Conrad (Hiddleston) whose alpha chops are established at the very beginning with a perfunctory fight in a bar. He wins. Kong himself is played in motion capture by that very interesting British actor Toby Kebbell who also plays Preston’s trusted subordinate Maj Jack Chapman.

The ape is repeatedly and anti-climactically revealed. Almost at once, our attention is pointlessly split into the gung-ho adventures of the army types (Preston is trying to find his missing buddy) and James, Mason and their party who have become separated from the military and discover the island’s startling human secret. They make an upriver journey in an entirely preposterous “boat” allegedly made from salvaged parts of a crashed plane.

The dramatic presence of Kong himself is muddled. The film tries to make him the island’s noble-savage deity, the hairy good guy, as opposed to the huge baddie lizards who are scuttling around the place but are kept in check by the mighty Kong. The script makes a half-hearted joke about not knowing what to call these lizards; I suspect none of the writers could agree. How did we get from the 1933 King Kong to this? A theory of de-evolution is needed.