Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)

'Pacific Rim: Uprising' throws away the dramatic tension and what little character building the 2013 original had, and just has fun with its premise resulting in a very uneven affair. The film is set ten years after the first with the world having to deal with another potential invasion of the Kaiju and it's up to a crew of young Rangers and their custom robot warriors known as Jaegers to stop it. It's really just more of the same here, but played a lot less straight and early on it gets rid of a lot that made the original film more engaging. Firstly, some characters are either missing this time around or they are brushed aside to little more than cameo roles here. If you read my review of the first 'Pacific Rim' I said that the character of Mako was by far the best written and more interesting. Well, here she's barely in the movie and once she's made her appearance we're left with your usual archetypes seen in Military movies.

Really the only main characters from the first film that takes the sides of our new cast is Charlie Day and Burn Gorman as the comic relief scientists. However Gorman gets the better deal of the two despite Day's character getting a more central role in the plot. I won't spoil anything here, but I didn't think I could hate this character more than when I saw him the first time but he is so obnoxious and the direction they go with him is so predictable that I felt they should have gone a different way. It's a shame too because I really enjoy the actor on shows like 'Always Sunny' but here, he is truly wasted. I will say that the film taking a more fun direction does make it a little more entertaining than the first movie and it has twice the action scenes but it's entertaining in the same way as a Michael Bay film and not a Del Toro action film.

Overall, 'Pacific Rim: Uprising' is a much better 'Transformers' movie but it also suffers the same issues. The movie throws in stupid visual and audio gags like Bay's 'Transformers' films though not nearly as ridiculous. But more than just being an annoying, these things date movies and when 'Uprising' releases on Blu-Ray later this year things such as a meme will already be dated. Although most of you can likely ignore these issues and still have a mighty fun time at the cineplex and really you could do so much worse (like 'Transformers' and yes, I will always trash it when I can). In the end, it's simply an average sequel to an action film that wasn't all that special to begin with.

6.0/10