Before he became an Oscar darling with The Shape of Water — his romanticized take on the Creature of the Black Lagoon — director Guillermo del Toro was preoccupied with another movie monster: Godzilla. His 2013 film Pacific Rim was a bloated variation of the Japanese staple about towering dinosaur-like aliens attacking earth and the huge dual-piloted robots (called jaegers) humans designed to fight them. It was a noisy, wet, dark spin on the Transformers franchise, and mildly entertaining but ultimately charmless slog through action movie cliches aimed at pre-adolescent boys. The fact a sequel was set for five years later owns more to its worldwide box office than its middling success in the states. I wasn’t exactly counting the days for its release.
But in truth, Pacific Rim: Uprising — which Del Toro produced but didn’t direct — is a marked improvement on its predecessor. It’s pure entertainment in the best Hollywood sense.
(L to R) JOHN BOYEGA as Jake and SCOTT EASTWOOD as Lambert in the Gipsy Avenger Conn-Pod in “Pacific Rim Uprising.”
It’s not clear it will go that way at the start, which is rife with corny dog set-ups. It’s 10 years after the alien monsters, known as kaiju, have been turned away, but the world’s government are still on alert for a return invasion. But Jake Pentecost (the impossibly engaging John Boyega) — son of the martyred hero of the last war (played previously by Idris Elba) is living on the edge as a scavenger until he’s bullied into training new pilots to avoid jail time. As it so happens, a shadowy Chinese corporation wants to erase the middlemen by building a new form of jaegers that can be controlled by a single pilot remotely based: drones. But what if something goes wrong? (Of course something will go wrong, you just probably won’t guess what and how.)
Like its forebear and, for that matter, every futuristic-militaristic action film in history, there’s posturing, dick wagging by competing men who are really bruhs, a generic woman coming between them, scrappy younger studs itchin’ for a fight and some action set-pieces that look like they used a lot of bandwidth to render for IMAX. It’s trope-vs-tripe in digital sound. But it works.
Once smart decision is to place most of the action during daylight hours so you can actually see the oversized ninja battles. Another is trimming fully 20 minutes from the last one, streamlining the narrative. Yet another is reinventing the plot every 15 minutes or so. A rogue jaeger — not a kaiju — becomes the nemesis early on; who is piloting it? But that ends up being a McGuffin, as does the next villain, and the next. Nothing makes a predictable film less predictable than throwing all the cliches us seriatim until one sticks.
And then there is the cast of pretty and energetic folks, led by the open-hearted Boyega and joined by Scott Eastwood, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman and several newer faces, who point and shoot and have a good ol’ time. Bully for them. The remind us to roll with it, logic be damned.
— Arnold Wayne Jones
Opens Friday nationwide.
