Pacific Rim Uprising Review

"Pacific Rim" is a dumb movie. I want to make that abundantly clear. It is a really dumb movie. But it's the type of really dumb movie that was mostly self-aware enough to be as equally entertaining as it is dumb. I mean, there's not much in terms of story. Idris Elba was a freaking awesome character that delivers one of the best movie speeches, but outside him, the human characters are either extremely wooden or mostly forgettable. There were monsters that climbed through rifts in the Pacific Ocean to terrorize the world and to fight them the government decided to build giant robots with overly complex established rules like drift compatibility that I think the filmmakers involved kinda forgot about halfway through. It's a movie that's really easy to pick apart due to the extreme lack of intelligence involved in much of the writing. But do you know what? The now Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro didn't care. He just wanted to live out his childhood fantasies by making a big, dumb movie about giant monsters fighting giant robots. If you turn off your brain and just enjoy the ride, it is extremely entertaining as your inner 9-year-old will have a huge grin on your face the entire time. Enough so that you will most likely be able to overlook all the glaring issues.

A sequel with a repeat performance of that is all I wanted with "Pacific Rim Uprising." It's a sequel we almost didn't get due to "Pacific Rim" flopping pretty hard in the United States. But thanks to strong overseas totals, especially from China, it's a sequel that was financially justified. And I was really happy about that. I was excited to get back to this alternate universe where giant monsters are roaming the earth and we have giant robots to fight them. Yeah, sure, the critics score on Rotten Tomatoes was uncomfortably low at 45 percent, but just like a 9-year-old might not even know or care about what Rotten Tomatoes is, I didn't care about the score. Slightly over half of the critics are hating on this movie? Big deal. As I've explained, the first movie is a really dumb movie that probably doesn't even deserve its 71 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. A 45 percent score for that movie would probably seem more fitting. So why should I care that this sequel is really low? I mean, the trailers look awesome enough and they promise me that this movie is going bigger and better with the monsters and the robots, seemingly being extremely self-aware. Yeah, sure, Guillermo isn't back in the directing chair this time around, but I was still super excited walking into the theater.

Turns out I have to begrudgingly concede that the critics were right this time around. I really wanted to love this movie. I was willing to set nitpicks aside for an entertaining romp with monsters and robots. But holy freaking cow did this movie not give me ANYTHING to love. It's 10 years later and the government has done an absolutely atrocious job at preparing for the chance that the Kaiju might return. Like, seriously, there's very few grown adults that know how to successfully pilot a Jaeger and the team in charge of the Jaeger all seem very uneducated and juvenile. Our only two real adult pilots are John Boyega, the son of the late Idris Elba in this universe, who, spoiler alert for the first movie, sacrificed himself at the end of the film, and Scott Eastwood. The two of them are barely drift compatible as it is and John Boyega starts the film out living a rebellious life because, as he narrates in the beginning, he is nothing like his father and only wants to steal old Jaeger parts to trade for his... Cap'n Crunch and Oreos? Some rebel. So we seemingly have a story arc like that of Michael B. Jordan in "Creed." That lasts five minutes until he is back as a Jaeger pilot because this crew has no one else to turn to. Go figure.

On top of that we have a 15-year-old girl, who is actually pretty cool in the movie. Our one character worth caring about. She actually build her own mini Jaeger. Say what? How did she do that? Is she the next Anakin Skywalker? But whatever. Because she's super cool, she is recruited into the small school of young Jaeger pilot cadets. Who we eventually turn to pilot all the Jaegers to fight the Kaiju. Because, again, we have no one else to turn to. Then we have other characters that do things. I really couldn't tell you much about anyone else because all of them make the boring cast in the first movie seem like top-notch, Oscar-worthy characters. The only thing that I can even think of pulling out and talking about is that someone gave Charlie Day one of the worst scripts in recent memory with a hilariously awful character arc and reveal. Poor guy had to do something with that atrocity and it never really works out. More stuff happens and we go quite a while without even having any action sequences at all. Just a whole ton of setup with these dull characters. Eventually we get a rogue Jaeger showing up to cause trouble and our team has to figure out what in the heck is going on as they battle this thing along with a handful of Kaiju-infected Jaeger minions.

Now I don't want to be one to complain at the fact that our Kaiju don't even show up for the longest time because the best monster movies in history force the audience to wait for the big reveal and "Pacific Rim" is something that did that all wrong by revealing all the monsters in the first five minutes of that first movie. In fact, I think that spoiled people into hating the 2014 "Godzilla" movie because Godzilla didn't show up for quite some time and people who had just watched "Pacific Rim" the year before had decided that they didn't care about world-building and plot setup as they just wanted a mindless Godzilla movie where Godzilla is fighting the other bad monsters for the entire run time like the Kaiju vs. Jaeger battles in "Pacific Rim." But for crying out loud, if you're going to go away from that formula that the first movie set up in favor of a more classic monster movie feel, give me a build up worth caring about. I was bored to tears for most of the movie. I didn't care about any of the plot. Most of the characters were complete garbage, including John Boyega. The 15-year-old girl was the only one worth caring about and she didn't do enough to make the movie worth watching. I just wanted some dumb fun from a "Pacific Rim" sequel and I didn't get that.

So check this out. Because I was so bored and there weren't very many people with me in the theater on a Monday afternoon, I pulled out my tablet and decided to calculate some of the timing from this movie. My showtime was 4:00. I didn't take note of exactly when my movie started, but there's usually 15 minutes of trailers and given that the credits finished at about 6:07 and the movie is only 1 hour 51 minutes long, the movie starting at around 4:15, give or take a few minutes, makes sense to me. The first time a Kaiju in its full glory shows up in this movie? Not counting the Kaiju-infested Jaegers or the Kaiju shown in flashbacks? 5:35. We have to wait 1 hour 20 minutes for a Kaiju to show up and start destroying Tokyo, I think it was. They were somewhere in Japan. And remember, this movie is only 1 hour 51 minutes long. I also decided to time the battle between the Kaiju and the Jaeger. It clocked in at 19 minutes long from when they first started fighting to when the battle was finally over. And there's about a 5-10 minute break in there where our depleted team of Jaegers, comprised solely of our young kids fighting alongside John Boyega and Scott Eastwood, have to regroup as the mega Kaiju is running towards Mt. Fuji.

Then there's this curious case of this battle. After being bored for the first 80 minutes of the movie where little happened, I was finally excited to see the fun action sequences that I paid to see. And sadly it was rather disappointing. It felt like the sparse leftovers of something much better. There were only three Kaiju that they had to wrangle up and in the first movie, it would've been a piece of cake. But no one from this team was very good at being a Jaeger pilot. I mean, this was mainly a group of kids with no prior experience of fighting in actual Jaegers. So the Kaiju mopped the floor with them for most of the battle. When the Jaeger team was winning, the battle became more like that awful final battle in "Man of Steel" with Superman and Zodd where Superman didn't seem to care about the lives of the millions of people he was ending while trying to stop Zodd. Neither do these kids in these Jaegers care about the humans around them as they grab entire buildings that are probably full of people and throw them at the Kaiju or grab cars on the ground and throw them at the Kaiju. There were zero consequences in this movie. They were determined that this was their opportunity to save the world. But what about the millions of people they were killing in the process?

If you watched the trailers for this movie and became intrigued because it looked like an extremely self-aware movie full of giant Kaiju fighting giant Jaegers, know that nearly all of the action sequences from the trailers, as well as John Boyega's speech, are from this final battle during the last 20 minutes of this movie. You can say they spoiled the movie in the trailers. But they had to because they chose to do jack squat in the first 80 minutes of the movie. I've heard some saying this is like "Independence Day Resurgence" to "Independence Day." And I kinda agree with that, although "Pacific Rim Uprising" isn't as bad as "Independence Day Resurgence" and "Pacific Rim" isn't as good as "Independence Day," which I think is slightly overrated anyways. But the principles apply. This is a half-hearted, boring, lazy sequel to a highly entertaining yet dumb original. I found "Uprising" about as entertaining as last year's "Transformers: The Last Knight," which, granted, isn't the worst Transformers movie, but is still a mostly worthless pile of empty nonsense that barely snuck onto my worst movies of the year list. I think I gave the original "Pacific Rim" a 7/10 back in 2013, which seems about right. For "Pacific Rim Uprising," I'm giving it a 5/10 and even that feels a bit nice.