King Kong worries

I'm seeing Kong tomorrow evening, and I'm honestly not expecting all that much. Undoubtedly it will be good, but I also suspect it will be overpraised. An Ain't It Cool reviewer recently compared it to Titanic, and while I liked that film more than many, it was highly overrated -- a leaden boy/girl story punctuated by spectacular disaste effects (it's James Cameron; go figure). The metacritic score for Kong currently stands at an ape sized 87, suggesting the sort of critical fawing usually reserved for, say, gay cowboy love stories, but what worries me most is that my favorite critic, Slate's David Edelstein, called Kong:

"A spectacular three-hankie tragic love story--sometimes dumb and often clunky and always pretty cornball, but just about irresistible."

And while I can appreciate clunky and cornball during a first viewing in a theater (it's the reason I came out of all three Star Wars prequels goofy and exhilirated), it's those qualities that bite back in further pondering and viewing. Those Star Wars prequels were just about irresistable themselves, at least with midnight crowds and years of light saber swinging geek-fetish-dreams swirling in my head, but after the opening day residue dried up, they all turned out to be pretty rotten, even the sorely overpraised Revenge of the Sith. Titanic left me similarly thrilled when I walked out; now I look back and defend it against the backlashers but don't see much more than a hokey romance and a cruiseboat's cashload of watery film wizardry.