Pacific Rim Uprising

I used to love monster films as a young lad. Those brilliantly awful ones like The Land That Time Forgot or The Valley Of The Gwangi. Or the dubbed Godzilla films you'd see on Channel 4, they were always fun. I mean, what's not to love about a 100m tall lizard fighting a huge moth in the middle of Tokyo. You can't go wrong. When the Guillermo Del Toro directed Pacific Rim was released in 2013 my inner child went ape, this was a film that was going to rock. Giant monsters known as Kaiju invade Earth all around the Pacific Rim and Earth fights back using huge robots known as Jaegers. How could it not be great? Turns out it was ok. For a film with that kind of ridiculous plotline it took itself fierce seriously and for some reason all the big action scenes took place at night making it all hard to see and to top it all off we had Charlie Hunnam in the lead role who is, to say the least a charisma vacuum (im convinced The Lost City Of Z was a once off). I didn't have high hopes for this sequel but to my surprise I enjoyed it.

The story begins with the Kaiju having been defeated for over a decade and Earth has semi rebuilt its Pacific cities. Jake Pentecost is an ex Jaegar fighter who now makes a living scavenging Jaegar machinery and Kaiju bodyparts. He's the son of the heroic Stacker Pentecost but wants to be as far from his father's legacy as possible. He unwillingly finds himself back in the military fold when he breaks the law and his former expertise comes in very useful when Earth finds itself under attack from an old enemy who has learned a new trick.

Pacific Rim Uprising is a stupid film. But happily it knows its a stupid film and it just goes with it and doesn't take itself seriously at all and because of this it's more fun than it's predecessor. Most of this is down to the new lead character Jake who's played by John Boyega. Boyega has great fun here and is a far better and more appealing lead than Hunnam. He's funny self effacing, grumpy and creates chemistry with everyone he shares the screen with just like he did in The Force Awakens. He gives us a character to care about in the midst of the carnage. Ahhhh the carnage, apart from some fun character moments it's all about the carnage and we get it in spades. A Sydney thrashing battle aside most of the films fun lies in the the final showdown. It's hilarious fun, chock full of money shots.....err...not those kind of money shots but loads of moments that will wake the kid inside you and have them bouncing around with glee. And one thing this film does right that the first film got wrong is to stage the majority of its action in glorious daylight. More no struggling to see what's going on. When a monster gets bounced off a skyscraper so hard the building falls over it's great to be able to see it without getting eye strain thank you very much.

As a sequel it checks off the usual checklist of things we'd expect to see in a follow up film. Both the good and the bad. It's bigger, louder and amazingly more bombastic than the first. But a bigger cast gives us a lot of unmemorable background characters especially the new Jaegar pilots who are pretty indistinguishable from one another by the films end. Scott Eastwood as senior soldier struggles unfortunately beside the charismatic Boyega. He might look like his Da but he doesn't have an ounce of his presence. The other main sequel addition is adding a kid to the mix. Cailee Spaeny as Amara Namani is far less annoying than most kid sidekicks and adds a tiny drop of heart to proceedings. Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day and Burn Gorman all return from the original film ensuring a nice connection between the stories.

Director Steven S. DeKnight is no Guillermo Del Toro though. The best thing about the original film was the futuristic world that it created and how it really delved into its inner workings like black market dealings, man machine mind melds and giant pregnant monsters. DeKnight stands on Del Toro's shoulders here and uses his work without really adding anything new to it all. The mechanics of the Jaegar's and the gooey bodily interest in the Kaiju so prevalent in the first film is nowhere to be seen here meaning this side of the story lacks any real kind of depth. It's a pity because it's a great mythology to build on.

At the end of the day this is a film about huge monsters fighting huge robots. If you think that's too stupid for you well then you really aren't going to like it but if you want to pass a couple of hours in a crash bang wallop way this should hit the spot.