‘PACIFIC RIM UPRISING’ Review

In 2013, director Guillermo Del Toro gave us Pacific Rim, which for my money is the best BBB (big budget b-movie) since Starship Troopers. What Pacific Rim lacked in subtext it more than made up for with an equally mystifying “how did this get made” level of spectacle, along with Del Toro’s deft touch of magic. This thing had a $190 million budget! It only made back around $100 million here, but the worldwide $400 million haul was aplenty to get a sequel made. Del Toro and company were good to go on said sequel about two years later…and suddenly Legendary Pictures put it on an indefinite hold. Sadly once it got back up and running, many of the elements that made that first film work like Del Toro (who remained on as producer), Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Clifton Collins Jr, and Ron Perlman weren’t able to return for one reason or another. Instead they got John Boyega and living-Ken-doll Scott Eastwood on board and recruited first time filmmaker Steven S. DeKnight, best known for showrunning Starz’ Spartacus series and the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil. Despite boasting a reported $150 million budget, Pacific Rim: Uprising‘s trailers looked more like a DTV sequel than a blockbuster, to my eyes. How’d it actually turn out? Kinda like Iron Eagle.

10 years after Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentacost and crew canceled the apocalypse, the threat of Kaiju returning to take over Earth has persisted enough to keep the Jaeger program alive. Cadets have been training under the steady hand of ace pilot Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood). Pentacost’s son Jake (John Boyega) followed in his father’s heroic footsteps as Nate’s partner before becoming a jaded rebel, thieving highly sought Jaeger scraps for money and squatting in a half-demolished mansion with a Kaiju skeleton in the backyard. On a scavenging adventure he discovers a rival thief Amara Namini (Cailee Spaeny) who’s taken it upon herself to create her own miniature Transformer…I mean Jaeger. After they’re caught by the law, Jake’s adopted sister Mako (Rinko Kikuchi) gives him no option but to rejoin the Jaeger program and help train the cadets, including Amara. Other than her, these cadets aren’t given any character. Meanwhile, Newt (Charlie Day) has been working with Liwen Shao (Tian Jing) on drone Jaegers which can be remotely operated by single pilots. Hermann (Burn Gorman) has grown distant from Newt and is having much more difficulty adjusting to life after drifting with the Kaiju brain 10 years ago. Newt, in fact, is quite comfortable with the Kaiju…and will help bring about the titular uprising.

Hunnam’s character from the first film wasn’t mentioned in any way, unless it was a blink-and-miss-it one line. The guy is charming to no end, and would have elevated this movie a LOT. Look, Boyega is great, you guys. We know this. What I’ve learned is that he’s at his best when he’s got someone great to play off of, and unfortunately nobody in the cast of Uprising was up to the job. Eastwood will occasionally remind me of his father, and then promptly squash it with a line reading that one can only describe as half-baked cardboard. Spaeny isn’t terrible, but doesn’t bring much to an underdeveloped part that’s highly reminiscent of Kikuchi’s from the first film, and even more reminiscent…no, identical to the kid from Transformers: The Last Knight. The chemistry between them is much a sibling rivalry, but there’s not enough depth to make it interesting. Aside from this, Charlie Day gets to ham it up with his (small) villainous variation of Newt that was kind of fun. Dialogue is the big problem here, and it’s a script that’s so churned into formula that it feels impossible that any actor can deviate from the mold they’ve been set in.The 100 minute runtime is both a blessing and a curse; the movie really moves at a brisk pace and doesn’t take any long pauses between action, but it also doesn’t allow for anything more than caricatures and archetypes. The first film had pilots which were stereotypes but were also actual characters, whereas here they’re nothing but roaster filler (and cannon fodder) so that we can have four Jaegers fighting as a team in the end.

Also not helping is DeKnight’s inexperience, working on a scope and scale that’s tremendously larger than anything he’s handled on the small screen. Even if things are as big here as they were the first time around, nothing feels like it has the same heft and weight. There’s no style to the camera, no low angles to make things tower, just standard shots straight out of a Power Rangers episode. Part of what I noticed being problematic in the trailers were that all the action sequences were taking place in broad daylight. While it’s nice to see more of the character detail at first, it’s much less forgiving than the first film’s neon lighting, dark ocean depths, and sea spray motifs. Still, the action sequences in Uprising are pretty fun. There’s a lot of negative to the movie, but there are a lot of fun bits that I couldn’t resist geeking out on. Kaiju piloted Jaegers! Kaiju-Jaeger hybrids! A Voltron-esque Kaiju abomination!  A ninja Jaeger! That little Trasfor…Jaeger! The final battle sequence runs for about 20 minutes and is quite entertaining, if nothing else.

Uprising feels more like a retread than a full fledged ten-years-later sequel, which doesn’t result in a bad movie as much as a bland, but entertaining, missed opportunity. The film ends with the exact same note that 2016’s abysmal Independence Day: Resurgence did, threatening to create a trilogy with the same MUCH bigger film that neither franchise will likely get to make. If Pacific Rim: Insert-Generic-Subtitle does get a green light, I hope that at least Hunnam joins Boyega to finish the Kaiju war. Please?