Pacific Rim Uprising review round up: Here's what the critics are saying
It's a mix-bag for the follow-up to Guillermo del Toro's robot vs monster mashup
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Your support makes all the difference.The sequel to Guillermo del Toro's globally successful Pacific Rim has arrived.
Titled Pacific Rim Uprising, the follow-up - this time directed by first-timer Steven S. DeKnight - sees John Boyega take centre stage for yet another large-scale story essentially about robots fighting monsters. Taking place ten years on, the film sees Boyega's Jake Pentecost - son of the character played by Idris Elba in the original - leading the charge against the evolved Kaiju as well as a rogue Jaegar named Obsidian Fury.
It's fair to say the critical consensus is mixed with some reviews branding it an overall tedious watch while others are praising the film for knowing what it is: fun, goofy entertainment.
The Independent, Geoffrey Macnab - 3 stars
Still, if you like films that are very noisy, very brash and have storylines that revolve around prolonged meaningless wrecking sprees, Pacific Rim Uprising won’t let you down. It has a likeable, tongue in cheek quality that you don’t find in Michael Bay’s horribly bombastic Transformers movies. In amid all the general headbanging havoc, Boyega lends a human touch. He is not taking the film too seriously and nor should we.
The Guardian, Benjamin Lee - 3 stars
The film in general moves at a sleeker pace, with more of an actual plot to match the shiny visuals. It’s strange given that del Toro, a newly minted Oscar-winning director, couldn’t make a more entertaining film than Uprising director Steven S DeKnight, whose credits lie solely on the small screen. If anything, del Toro’s overexcitable ambition muddied the focus, while the sequel plays more like the solidly entertaining A-list B-movie we all wanted the first time.
Pacific Rim Uprising delivers plentiful CG mayhem, first between rival Jaegers (thanks to a mysterious rogue sentinel), and then between Jaegers and a trio of kaijus with transformative skills of their own. What it lacks, though, is both del Toro’s trademark Lovecraftian imagery (all slick tentacles and dank subterranean locales) and the sense of thunderous heft that the Mexican auteur bestowed upon his titans.
Entertainment Weekly, Chris Nashawaty
The follow-up feels like a flat cocktail of tedious mayhem, amateur-hour Starship Troopers-level acting (minus the tongue-in-cheek irony), and plot holes so gaping that a 20-story radioactive iguana could rampage right through them.
[It's] a movie that has nothing on its mind but getting from start to finish in one piece — a movie that wants to plug the hole in a sinking ship in order to strengthen the Pacific Rim brand and set it sailing towards a climactic final chapter. Depressingly, “Uprising” is never better than when it’s setting up another sequel.
Pacific Rim Uprising is in cinemas 23 March
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