Kaiju return for epic fight in ‘Pacific Rim Uprising’
It’s better than a “Transformers” movie.
Is that damning with faint praise? I’m not sure it’s praise at all. But it is true. “Pacific Rim Uprising” is, at least for about half the movie, better than a Michael Bay exercise in eardrum shattering. The sequel isn’t as good as the original, however, which probably isn’t a surprise, considering neither “Pacific Rim” director Guillermo del Toro nor star Idris Elba returns.
That would have been hard to explain anyway for Elba, whose character, Stacker Pentecost, sacrificed himself and his awesome name to save the world in the first film. This time we meet his son, Jake (John Boyega, slumming between “Star Wars” movies). Steven S.
DeKnight takes over as director.
Jake is not the heroic type. In fact, he’s a criminal, stealing robot parts to sell on the black market. Since the war, in which the humans, fighting in dualcontrolled mind-melding giant robots called Jaegers, defeated the alien kaiju — if you fully understand that, you both saw the original and need a hobby — the world is at peace. But no one really believes peace can last, in part because no one was exactly sure why they attacked in the first place and, more importantly, you know, sequel.
Jake gets tangled up with junkyard orphan Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny), who has built an illegal Jaeger out of spare parts she’s found or stolen, and they both get busted and sent to a training facility in China. It’s either go to jail or he becomes a trainer and she becomes a student. So here they are. Jake, it turns out, washed out of training years ago, and his former partner, Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood), hasn’t forgotten it.
Amara, meanwhile, joins the ranks of a kind of junior division, teenagers training to become Jaeger pilots. Where, oh where, can this be leading?
If you guessed the return of the kaiju and a chaotic gargantuan battle that lasts more than 30 minutes, you may pick up your prize at the door.
Remember how everyone was upset in “Man of Steel” when Superman destroyed a bunch of buildings (including Wayne Enterprises) in the climactic battle? That’s the starting point for this movie. These guys, good and bad, crush buildings like bugs and no one blinks.
At one point Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day, back for more), watches the destruction with a yawn, saying, “OK, we’re going with giant robots again? Real original, guys. Not impressed, not impressed.”
Later, when Jake and Amara inevitably have to “drift” (the term for the psychic bonding required to pilot the Jaeger), Jake says, after a tumble, “That was supposed to be epic. It wasn’t.”
At least they’re honest.