JAEGERS, ROLL OUT!
Movie Review – Pacific Rim: Uprising
Review by Paul Preston
If ever there was a film crying out for using your MoviePass, this is it. For the uninitiated, MoviePass is a Netflix-type model for the movie theater. The pass allows you to see unlimited movies in the cinema (one per day) for a monthly $9.95 flat rate, so really…there’s no movie that’s a total waste of money any more, ‘cause you’ve barely spent any. You can invoke the pass as a verb. For example, in a pre-MoviePass world, a conversation might have gone like this:
“Want to see Pacific Rim: Uprising?”
“If I wanted to see an Eastwood running around barking orders at young military recruits, I’d rent Heartbreak Ridge.”
But with MoviePass, the conversation could go like this:
“Want to see Pacific Rim: Uprising?”
“Not gonna pay, but I’ll MoviePass it!”
I saw Pacific Rim: Uprising at a movie theater in my small upstate New York hometown. It’s weird when you leave Los Angeles. It turns out people everywhere don’t always talk about movies all the time. Like, it’s unsettling. But in the Southside Mall Cinemas, they talk movies somewhat. Not with intense depth (for example, they didn’t know who Steven Soderbergh was), but the girl who sold me my ticket said of the Pacific Rim sequel, “It’s not terrible.” Not gonna lie, I figured that was about the best endorsement I was gonna get for that film, so I pushed off Soderbergh’s Unsane and Love, Simon, which I have to see with my wife, but I won’t miss ‘cause Hollywood doesn’t make enough romantic comedies, and I MoviePassed Uprising.
By the time you divide all the films I saw in the last month into $9.95, seeing Pacific Rim: Uprising probably ended up costing me a dollar (slow month for me, a lot of out-of-town time). Now that I’m on the other side of the movie, I can say – THANK GOD. For all the energy Guillermo del Toro brought to his vision of giant robots fighting giant monsters, there’s equal parts obligatory routine brought to the sequel.
This film picks up ten years after the human war with the Kaiju (giant monsters) and Jaegers (human-operated giant robots) still wander parts of the Earth to maintain stability as scavengers steal Jaeger technology for the black market. One such scavenger is Jake (John Boyega), son of inspirational Jaeger pilot Stacker Pentecost, who led the fight in the war. Jake has that film plot happen to him where he gets in a lot of trouble, and the way out of that trouble is to be the good guy in an action movie. He teams with a young tech-head and an old rival pilot to thwart the return of the Kaiju.
The first half of the movie actually has a lot going on besides the above. There’s a plot to have the Jaegers be drone-controlled and an interesting arrival of a rogue Jaeger. Halfway through the film, there’s a reveal of a villain that signals the end of everything interesting. The reveal hinges around the return of Charlie Day’s obnoxious scientist character, Newt, reminding me Day has done great work on the TV screen…and that’s where it stopped. The mugging is relentless.
Boyega’s rival is played by Scott Eastwood, who deep down, I believe, feels like he’s being a character like what he thinks we would want to see if we needed a guy-in-charge military type. And he’s trying to put that on for us. One problem – It LOOKS like he’s acting! ‘Case ya don’t know, that’s bad. I just didn’t buy him for a second. The troops that make up his team are more or less interchangable.
It seems the real effort was put into the monsters and robots. They look unique and as real as a robot/monster fight in a Japanese city would look (although what has to be massive amounts of collateral damage in civilian casualties is never addressed). If you complained about some of del Toro’s action sequences being too dark, fear not, all major actions sequences of Uprising are in broad daylight. But even when the effects are popping and the action scene stakes get raised, there’s simply an over-abundance of dumb and/or stilted dialogue infesting this movie. The actors even deliver the dialogue half-heartedly, as if they know that even a good reading won’t have the intended effect. And this goes all the way up to the final scene when the movie ends awkwardly, unsure itself that that was the best way to go out.
I was disappointed to see that the director was Steven S. DeKnight, one of the main minds shepherding Marvel’s Daredevil TV show to Netflix. That show took its time, had style, and deftly-delivered conversation. But I guess if I want to see those things, I better MoviePass Unsane right away.
Directed by: Steven S. DeKnight
Release Date: March 23, 2018
Run Time: 111 Minutes
Rated: PG-13
Country: UK/USA/China
Distributor: Universal Pictures
