A waste of time and talent

with drug dealers, stereotypical bad buys, mercenaries galore.

Kher yearns for his son to take up the family business — not the cashews but the contract killing. He uses all the tactics parents usually deploy in such a case — suicide threats, emotional blackmail and also here the threat of him being eliminated by others in the business.

The boy gives in, only to be caught in a ‘dharam sankat’ — he gets a twisted contract to kill people he knows and needs to figure out what is behind it, since his family follows a policy of never killing an innocent.

What could have been a rich plot is let down by seriously sup-bar humour. So you get jokes like, “Mai JNU student reh chuka hoon, mai chup nahi reh sakta” and “Galti wo hoti hai jo sudhaari ja sake. Jo jhelni pade, use beemari kehte hain.”

It is tragic to see actors of the caliber of Kher, Kay Kay Menon and Kapoor so wasted. This is happening far too often; it’s just not funny anymore.

When even Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) wasn’t able to spin his magic around the 2013 original, it’s hard to imagine why Steven S DeKnight — a television hack-for-hire making his feature film debut — though he would be able to do so. There isn’t even the mandatory crash-boom fun factor in this follow-up to Pacific Rim.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on some admittedly snazzy CGI effects, but clearly just a pittance from the budget went on screenplay. There are no relatable characters or intelligible action set-pieces, just a morass of metallic mayhem.

The second outing follows a younger generation of pilots who are readying to save the planet from an imminent apocalypse. Cue cataclysmic carnage, monsters-versus-robots, smack-bangs and cartoonish caricatures.

The leader, a hustlerturned-saviour (John Boyega), addresses the crew with jingoistic bravado before the climactic do-ordie mission.

Extremely juvenile …Uprising is recommended for videogame geeks only.