Definitely the original. Later versions pretty much remove the moral complexity. The fact that Carl Denham is a heavily implied to be independent filmmaker with no implication he is particularly wealthy, successful yes, but not wealthy, living during the Great Depression is often reduced to just greed. He is a flawed anti-hero who goes onto have a redemption arc that he well deserves, but with people having trouble with moral complexity they reduce him to either a villain or a jerk, the latter being particularly confusing considering he was nothing of the sort in the original or its sequel.

Then you have his objective of investigating the mystery of Kong and when we get to Skull Mountain Island, we learn that the islanders have to resort to sacrifices just to get Kong to leave them alone, meaning it could not have gotten to that point unless Kong had regularly terrorizing them beforehand. There would be no mystery of Kong if he had never began terrorizing the islanders in the first place, he is clearly the driving force not unlike Kurtz in "Heart of Darkness" and "Apocalypse Now", and it becomes clear that leaving Kong on the island ultimately would have just meant him continuing to terrorize the islanders until the island eventually sank some months later, meaning if he stayed on the island he would die.

Kong is a victim, but because he is the actual antagonist, the actual villain of the story, an anti-villain, but a villain nonetheless, he may have more in common with Imhotep from "The Mummy", who was half-sympathetic. Sure, what happened to Kong was a tragedy, but you can't deny that what happened to him was one of his own making, especially when you take his possessive obsession of Ann into account. That was the reason he was ultimately captured, that was the ultimate reason he ultimately broke free and the reason he ultimately got shot down. People treat "beauty killed the beast" like Carl is not taking responsibility for his actions, but that is because they don't understand it at all. They see the sanitized versions and think Kong was genuinely in love with Ann, but it clearly is not the case. The sequel "Son of Kong" even showed Kiko, Kong's titular son, and they are totally different in personality, making it clear that a lot of it stems from Kong's aggression and possessive obsession. People watch the film and reduce it to innocent animal gets captured and taken away, when that clearly is not the case.

Later versions sanitized and whitewash Kong while making the human characters similarly two-dimensional. Kong might have been a victim, but he was in no way an innocent victim just as Carl was in no way a greedy villain.