The best special effect in “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” is purely genetic as creators Chris Black and Matt Fraction had the brilliant idea to cast Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt Russell as the same character, the younger actor playing the iconic one in flashbacks. Both Russells are great, underrated performers, and it’s fun to see them play variations on each other, with Wyatt leaning into the charm his father displayed in the ‘80s in a way he doesn’t often get to do. And it’s not mere stunt casting in that both performers actually put in the work to capture a young version of a potential hero and what time and tragedy would do to that figure. It feels like they collaborated to echo each other’s choices. There are a couple of fun performances in the woefully underwritten ensemble, but this is the Russells’ show. Only a legend like Kurt Russell could steal a program from Godzilla.
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” takes place in two timelines. The current material is tied to the end of 2014’s “Godzilla,” wherein the big lizard and a strike team decimated San Francisco, leading to a survivor of that attack named Cate (Anna Sawai) traveling to Japan in search of information about her missing father, only to discover he had an entirely different family there. In Japan, Cate meets her half-brother Kentaro (the charismatic Ren Watabe, the non-Russell stand-out of the show), and the two set out to find their mysterious dad. Kentaro brings along a tech junkie cohort named May (Kiersey Clemons), and the trio ends up looping in a legend named Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell), a former soldier who may know where all this chaos started.
Cue the flashbacks to the 1950s, wherein a young Shaw (Wyatt Russell) is assigned to work with a woman named Keiko (Mari Yamamoto) and a researcher named Bill Randa (Anders Holm), who will grow up to be the same character played by John Goodman in “Kong: Skull Island.” That Holm will turn into Goodman in less than three decades is a little less believable than the Wyatt-Kurt connection, but the “Workaholics” star is just likable enough to make it forgivable.
The flashbacks end up centering the military response to Godzilla, playing with some of the themes of these titans since its inception regarding man’s interference with the natural world and human firepower unleashing massive destruction. But it’s all woefully underdeveloped in terms of theme and character, too often forcing people to repeat things we know or will learn in subsequent movies, given the action of this one takes place before two other blockbusters most fans will have already seen.
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