Every kid knows you treat a Godzilla movie the way you treat wrestling: You pay attention when the rubber-suited gladiators wreak havoc, and you tune out when the soap opera stuff is happening. The monster-less scenes with people talking are when you can do everything but watch the movie—go to the bathroom, play with your toys, get another slice of pizza, bug your little brother.

For a good portion of its running time—the first half of its two hours, I'd say—the Godzilla reboot frustrates your desire to watch giant monsters break stuff. At first there are no monsters. Then, for a while, just as the monsters are about to destroy a city, the scene shifts back to people talking about the monsters. In an egregious example of cinematic cock-blocking, one entire battle is skipped over. This happens three or four times. Finally, when Godzilla settles in San Francisco, things get serious and the audience is treated to the no-holds-barred, destroy-all-monster-a-thon they've been expecting. In retrospect, it was smart of the film to save up Godzilla for the conclusion, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a little impatient for the big reveal.

And at least the talking scenes are filled with interesting actors, even if the scenes themselves aren't so interesting. If you think of Godzilla as a retirement fund for some of your favorite actors, it's not so bad. And watching Bryan Cranston, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe, Juliette Binoche, and David Strathairn fumble through the expository bits of a Godzilla move is fun, even if the dialogue is pretty forgettable. Unfortunately, the lead actors are less interesting. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as the child of a family that was destroyed in a giant monster attack, is about as bland as possible. Johnson's character, Ford Brody (!?!) is in the middle of all the action, but he mostly just stands and stares and occasionally frets about his wife and child when the plot calls for it. Elizabeth Olsen turns in easily the worst performance of her career as the imperiled wife. All the other characters disappear during the film's climax, and the audience is eager to forget about them, anyway.

But let's not get too negative. A good chunk of Godzilla is made up excellent action sequences, capably directed by Gareth Edwards (whose previous film, Monsters, was a solid creature feature, too.) And those sequences are everything they should be: They leave the audience tense and sickeningly elated at the size and the scope of the menace. Godzilla preys on your deepest fears—tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, earthquakes—and Edwards drops you right in the middle of it all. (A word of advice: See it on the biggest screen possible, but it doesn't matter whether you see Godzilla in 3D or not.) The film gives Godzilla a purpose that might take uninitiated American audiences by surprise, and the monster "acting" is top-notch, without being cheesy. This Godzilla gets the character exactly right—if anything, it makes the stupidly "realistic" 1998 Godzilla look even worse than it already did—and dusts him off for new audiences. Let's just hope the next time we see Godzilla, he'll be in a film that's a half-hour shorter than this one, and let's doubly hope that they make all those half-hour's worth of cuts from the human side of the film and not from the giant monster action.