'Pacific Rim: Uprising' - Review

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

In a move designed seemingly to please only the signatories of internet polls, this drift-incompatible sequel to 2013’s monster mash has double the action but half the charm. The Kaiju threat has returned, and now Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), son of the late great Stacker (Idris Elba) must begrudgingly rejoin the Pan Pacific Defence Corp and assist old drift partner, Lambert (Scott Eastwood), in training a breed of new recruits to pilot the giant mechanoid Jaegers against the aliens.

Guillermo Del Toro’s fling with giant-sized filmmaking did a lot of things (bring smiles to lovers of Godzilla movies, prove you could make a movie about robots punching each other an enjoyable experience, and allow Ron Perlman a fine slice of ham), but ‘demand a sequel’ wasn’t one of them. It was a flight of fancy; a chance for the Mexican director to take a break from horror and pay his respects to long-gone titans of entertainment like Ray Harryhausen and Toho. When Del Toro spoke about the Jaegers, he carried a gleeful geeky grin as he waxed lyrical about their fusion of World War 2-era aesthetic and futuristic tech. He sweated the small stuff and ensured the giant mechs had personality, or as much personality a honking, creaking mass of metal and gears can have. When one arrived on screen, a sense of perspective and scale was maintained by low-angle shots and thundering sound design. Now, the revamped Gypsy Danger is slimmed-down, polished to a mirror shine, and wields a lightsaber-esque sword; little more than a Lancaster Bomber turned Megazord.

That awe-inspiring sense of scale is abandoned almost entirely here. Save for a few quick shots of giant feet threatening to crush faceless civilians, most of the combat is shot as though the robots are the characters. Entire city blocks are demolished with all the impact of collapsing card castles, and there’s no moment to equal - let alone top - the moment from Del Toro’s original where Gypsy Danger wields a cargo liner like a baseball bat and wallops a Kaiju in the face. Dan Mindel’s (Star Trek, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) grainy cinematography works wonders with the in-cockpit action and physical props, but reduces the Jaegers themselves to little more than weightless action figures. 

That’s in the moments his images survive the atrocious editing, anyhow: this is a film not so much cut together as hacked and shunted into something vaguely resembling a coherent whole. It takes an awful lot for a film to dump the vacuum of charisma that is Charlie Hunnam and somehow get worse, but Uprising is just that: a lot. The narrative moves at a ridiculous pace, squashing at least three hours and change worth of plot, subplot, character building and sequel setup into less than two. We barely have time to get acquainted with our new batch of Jaeger pilots before moving on to more of Charlie Day’s gurning, then whip-panning back to Boyega and Eastwood sweating at each other. 

Boyega, mountain of engagement that he is, almost singlehandedly ropes everything together with bravado and some expertly-timed delivery, but is overwhelmed by the film’s insistence on pushing past him to the next scene. Eastwood is there purely to grin “Hell yeah” every once in a while, and Day has all the personality squashed out of him. Newcomer Cailee Spaeny (playing a Rey-like scavenger who cobbles together her own miniature Jaeger) has just about enough room to make an impression, but falls victim to the film’s preference for breaking over building.

No-one’s going to hold up the original as a bastion of great characters: Hunnam’s Raleigh Beckett and Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori (the former is absent without explanation, the latter appears for little more than a motivational cameo) were thumbnail archetypes, but they were deliberately and almost brilliantly so. You didn’t leave the cinema struggling to remember their names, unlike the cast of  Uprising, who are barely permitted three sentences before another plot thread has them carted off-screen.

That’s not to say there isn’t the ghost of a good time banging around inside the shell: Burn Gorman returns as the cantankerous Doctor Gottlieb, and is having a great deal of fun stuttering through the scenery he’s chewing, A brief moment of quiet that pits John Boyega against the contents of an ice cream-filled freezer while Eastwood looks on is pure deadpan joy. Humour on the whole is rather broad here, comprised of scale-game gags involving the Jaegers and some oddly dated internet references (including an appearance from Eduard Khil’s “I Am Very Glad, as I'm Finally Returning Back Home”). The very instant the BBFC warning for ‘rude gesture’ appears, you’re counting down the minutes until inevitable payoff.

Yet by the time even that promise is sealed, too many others have been broken. Everyone involved from director Steven S. DeKnight to Boyega (who shares a production credit) talks loud and proud about honouring the original, but the (and I can’t relive I’m typing this) legacy of Pacific Rim is not so much respected as ransacked. Del Toro’s enjoyable homage to the monster movies that fuelled his imagination as a child is now soiled by needless expansion, and I can’t for one moment imagine he’s truly happy with the dead weight which will forever drag down his blockbusting indulgence. Pacific Rim didn’t need a plot, and Uprising’s ruthless determination to create one betrays its true form as an empty machine in search of a soul.