This week on the Short Attention Span Show is Pacific Rim: Uprising, the continuation of the Guillermo del Toro-directed Pacific Rim from 2013. This time, however, del Toro is only on hand as one of the many producers, and the directing chores go to television director Steven S. DeKnight.
Again, it's human-piloted giant robots, known as Jaegers, battling even bigger Kaiju – giant monsters from another dimension. This sequel is just more of the same. In fact, it is much, much more of the same. Actually, it's way too much of the same. It's one theater shaking action scene after another. This seemingly unending digital mayhem of robots and monsters fighting while shattering glass skyscrapers and busting up asphalt quickly becomes numbing.
The barely-there story involves Jaeger academy dropout, Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), and scrappy teen inventor, Amara (Cailee Spaeny), and their ultimate redemption. The malnourished plot, about rogue Jaegers, had promise, but here it serves to string together one gargantuan action sequence after another and nothing more.
This wind-up toy of a movie generally works like this: Quick superficial character moment, then loud action scene, then brief exposition, then loud action scene...and so on. The plot elements are so slap-dash that a big, shocking revelation at the midway point registers as unbelievable and so silly that you really don't think that they are serious.
There is nothing at the center of Uprising. Its sole purpose for existing is as background noise.
