'Pacific Rim: Uprising' REVIEW: Blockbuster Rock'em Sock'em comes off Underwhelming

'Pacific Rim: Uprising' is the sequel to 2013's 'Pacific Rim', originally directed by Guillermo del Toro. For the sequel it's being directed by Steven S. Knight and it shows that it comes from a completely different vision. When I saw the first film I thought it was awesome. It's a film that knew what it was: A movie in which big giant robot fight big giant monsters. No more, no less. In theory the sequel should be bigger and better. It's definitely bigger alright, but it just got a whole lot dumber.

10 years after the events of the first film, Jake Pentecost (played by John Boyega) who is the son of Idris Elba's character gets brought back into the world of Jaegers to train a new generation of pilots. The film also stars Scoot Eastwood as Nate Lambert and Cailee Spaeny as Amara Namani and together they go up against a new Kaiju threat that will end all life as we know it.

To be honest there are a couple of aspects of this film can be considered an improvement over the first one. Firstly being that John Boyega is surely a more charismatic lead than Charlie Hunnam is. Secondly, the robots vs. monsters sequences take place in broad daylight. As much as I like the first film and how the action scenes were huge wide shots that capture the fights really well, it did disappoint me that they were taking place at night in the rain and underwater. This time it's bright, clear and about as fun to watch. That's all that has improved. The special effects did not disappoint as it probably was meant to look like a cinematic cartoon.

As much as there are attempts at improvement, the movie drops low at how dumb and tedious this film can be. The movie scraps the old characters from the original and replaces them with stock characters who are uninteresting and not investing at all except John Boyega of course. While the advertising makes you think that this film will be all the juices that we want in a movie like this, it's all left to the back end. The movie is so pretentious that it want a cinematic universe by making this film a filler one. There is also twist that's completely ridiculous even by this franchises standards with Charlie Day's character from the first film. It even has an ending that's identical to Independence Day Resurgence (2016) that made me laugh so hard knowing it's not going to happen due to the quality of this film.

The movie tries to be bigger and faster than the first film with no regards for what made that first one enjoyable to begin with and ultimately fails. It's way too fast and way too boring to be any fun. John Boyega presence alone can't elevate it to be more than just a cash-cow.

'Pacific Rim: Uprising' gets a C-