Looks like Transformers on the cheap
Pacific Rim Uprising 12A cert, 111 min
Dir Steven S Deknight Starring John Boyega, Cailee Spaeny, Scott Eastwood, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman, Jing Tian, Zhang Jin
Pacific Rim is not a film you ever sensed was aching for a sequel. In the summer of 2013, Guillermo del Toro’s Brobdingnagian smorgasbord of monsters and machines was a complete gourmet meal of retro wonderment, rustled up from old rubber creature features and Japanese mecha anime with Michelin-level expertise. But it was only the film’s sizeable box office haul in China that took it into profit – so you could choose to read this China-centric follow-up as either a cold-blooded business manoeuvre or just a generous way of saying thanks.
Either way, it’s pretty atrocious, and tramples both the premise and detail of del Toro’s original in order to make its own barely coherent ideas stick.
Ten years have passed since the nightmarish kaiju came clambering through the dimensional rift on the ocean floor, and the Jaegers – the towering robotic rigs that did battle with the creatures – are either rusting in hangars or being broken for scrap.
The black market for robot parts is how Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) earns his keep. The wayward son of Idris Elba’s dearly departed Stacker Pentecost, Jake is eking out life in his father’s shadow, but re-enlists along with fellow street tyke Amara (Cailee Spaeny) just as a new generation of Chinese-built Jaegers, masterminded by Jing Tian’s icy industrialist, are deployed. A mysterious rogue Jaeger attacks, a conspiracy emerges, then eventually so do some kaiju.
It took four people to write Pacific Rim Uprising, and it feels like the work of a committee who heard about the original third-hand. The mesmerising backdrops that lent Pacific Rim’s action sequences the visual texture of hallucinations are nowhere to be seen. Instead, the battles largely take place in flat grey daylight and the resulting pixelly starkness looks less like Pacific Rim than Transformers on the cheap: less eye candy than optical gruel. As such, Boyega has his work cut out for him, and while he’s never less than watchable, the muddled plotting denies him the space a star turn requires.
Watching del Toro’s film felt like playing with toys as big as skyscrapers, but everything about this successor feels trinket-sized.