In OP's defense, I was actually just thinking about DKC series as a whole. I just bought Tropical Freeze for the Wii U for $25 and 100%'d it. Amazing game, the whole soundtrack is remixed from older songs, but in high quality and refitted to match the theme.
Anyways, I don't think there has been a bad DKC game. There's the main 3 for the SNES. DK64 was completely acceptable, but a long grindy slog that killed collectathons, but in and of itself, was perfectly serviceable. The spinoff games for the GB/x systems were fine, too.