“Pacific Rim”
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Starring Charlie Hunnan, Idris Elba, Charlie Day, Rinko Kikuchi, Diego Klattenhoff, Burn Gorman, Ron Perlman
Action, Adventure, Fantasty
131 Minutes
PG-13

Going in to this Guillermo del Toro-stampedcreature feature, there are clearly two routes we could be embarking down. Accepting the staunch inevitability that this sky-scraping blockbuster will most likely be dumb is key but, at the same time, we can’t help but hope that it will be more than a mere spectacle-driven showdown between robots and monsters. It is with a heavy head that I tell you, Pacific Rim is not very good.

In his quest to make something that crosses the borders of nations and ages, del Toro taps into something else entirely; a pandering soap of an actioner leaning with all its weight on brazen, inconsequential destruction and shimmery, bang-em-up CGI. Missing a massive chance to tell a story that feels the least bit real, del Toro’s chief offense is in crafting something that is more eye-rolling than entertaining. He settles on a wet dream of soapy, bathtub thrashings fueled by the seeming imaginative power of a candy-addled toddler. The one-liners are laughable, character motivation is as thin as the post-it notes this script seems to be made up of and even the mile-high action feels weightless and hollow. Like kids who’ve yet to develop a sense of empathy, this is an exercise in slamming action figures together until the pieces inevitably break.

As the lights in the theaters dim, there is a single moment of promise, but that promise quickly fizzles. The blurry haze of sparkling dust in which the movie begins is revelatory, sucking us in with little effort and pure simplicity but that dream of restraint breaks like a dry wishbone. The summation montage to follow smashes our hopes of this being anything worthwhile as fast as the giant Kaijus wreck havoc on a city. There’s a degree of soul-bearing to the pre-title sequence in a blockbuster of this caliber that reveal the tone and rationale and from the moment Charlie Hunnam starts recounting the history between the Kaiju and the Jaegers, we know we’re in store for something grim.

This brings us to the “plot”. After a rift in the bottom of the ocean mysteriously opens up, mankind drops all their petty international relations to focus on the 2,500 ton monsters emerging from that electric blue hole. Hunnam stars as Raleigh Becket, a ruffian who, for reasons unexplained, is charged with piloting one of the most expensive pieces of machinery in the entire history of the world; a Jaegar. Each country has a handful of their own Jaegars that stand as our first and last defense against the permanently pissed-off Kaiju.

Although we’re only introduced to about five, you can easily do a Google search and find call-sheets for a slew of Jaegars that are never even seen in the movie. In this fact, one thing is self-evident: del Toro’s overreaching and shameless attempt at franchising. Even before the success of the movie has been weighed with audiences, he has taken to penning a prequel comic book detailing the history of the Kaiju wars.

As the drifter hero that we’ve become so familiar with, Hunnan’s Raleigh is sketched so thin, it’s hard to distinguish him from the wall behind him. Slamming a hodgepodge of action hero tropes into one blonde dude isn’t ironic, it’s worthless and Hunnan proves it within minutes of his overextending screen time. With dialogue culled from the book of Cheese 101, Hunnan buys into it hook, line and sinker without holding back. Staring off into the distance while talking, his delivery is marked by perpendicular sight lines and carries the blocking of a mockumentary. Self-aware though his performance may actually be deep, deep down, it doesn’t shine through. His stony performance comes off as pompous mimicry, hardly setting himself up for a leading man career outside of his role as Jax on FX‘s Sons of Anarchy.

Although the characters surrounding Hunnan are sketched as broadly as barns, they do more with the idle clichés they are handed. Idris Elba is the frigid commander with a ridiculously contrived name (Stacker Pentecost) but his many supporting roles have prepared him well for this. Although he gets handed terminally silly lines such as “Today, we’re canceling the apocalypse,” he handles his role with seasoned grace.

As a counterbalance to the commandeering pretense of Elba’s Pentecost, Charlie Day is, once again, a loose cannon. Riffing on the Charlie gag he’s perfected on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, he’s a jittery, scene-stealing eccentric boiling over with energy. As drab as Hunnan may be, Day is a jolt of electricity to the film. Although his scenes are draped in a starkly different tone, he seems to have hit the main vein of what this movie should have been about: fun. Watching him bolt around as a mad scientist and his pinging off of fellow researcher Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) is exactly the kooky antics we expect from a creature feature with talent this size.

Outside the bro circle, there’s Rinko Kikuchi‘s Mako Mori, a character shoehorned into the most lazily written love story of all time. The sexual tension between Mako and Raleigh is hinted at in the script but entirely absent onscreen. Hunnan and Kikuchi’s chemistry is as steamy as a bowl of gazpacho.

Trying to mimic the complexity of greater, smarter films like Inception, del Toro and screenwriter,  Travis Beacham, are happy to create their own lingo for their movie’s universe but struggle to sell these silly ideas, which are barely passing as pseudo-science. All this talk of neural bridges, mind synching, “the drift,” and neural handshakes are little more than fancy words for numb, retread ideas. Even attempting to piggyback on the blatantly obvious environmental metaphors seeping from James Cameron‘s Avatar has failed del Toro as he is unable to suggest anything meaningful beneath the smashing of giant robots and monsters.

With a lofty 131 minutes around it’s belt, Pacific Rim surely does take its time to build up to the big action sequences and when the robots and monsters (excuse me Jaegars and Kaiju) do duke it out, the result is almost laughable. With all the missiles, plasma guns and slinky swords at their dispense, the battles between Jaegers and Kaijus always seems to come down to rock-em-sock-em box-offs with each party taking prolonged, confusingly slow swings at each other.

In a film of this size, production design is king, but even that element has fallen flat. The CG sandbox in which del Toro plays feels so over-saturated and overblown that the spectacle itself is undermined. Every shot seems to take place in a storm, at sea, at night, and partially underwater. The hackneyed lighting and poor framing, with most cameras working in tight close quarters to the jumbo fisticuffs, allow the sense of scale to quickly slip away. Environmental repercussions likewise are simply whisked off or ignored entirely.

In this, as in most things here, nothing makes sense. There’s enough face-palming to give yourself a black eye and the half-baked solutions peppering the character’s decision making prowess are outright comical. At one point, a giant wall is suggested to stop the Kaiju… and then they build a giant wall. When you find the audience shaking their heads at the stupidity of the character’s choices, we’re reaching a fundamental breaking point.

The nonsensical, creative lethargy is most accurately symbolized by a scene in which a Jaeger breaks down and the father-son duo piloting the thing pop out of the top of its giant mechanical head and decide to shoot a flair gun at the assaulting Kaiju. There is literally no plan to their action, and had some other Jaegar not stepped in and saved them, they would have died immediately for their stupidity. These coincidence-driven plot lines are the scoliosis-stricken backbone holding this Frankenstein’s monster together. In this way, Pacific Rim borders on being dumber than the Transformers franchise.

Famed for his inventive creature design, del Toro has put actual story development to the side and focuses mainly on his corral of brutish doodles. After making something as genre-bending as Pan’s Labyrinth, this effort is almost embarrassing, but del Toro’s wears his boyish adoration for anime and classic monster mythology on his sleeve, confusing his shameful sweatpants boner for something that he should proudly display.

While Pacific Rim is very clearly derivative of the big money-raking blockbusters of the past, its wandering eye plagiarism has been noticed and reported. The tepid action and blinding cinematography only work in a vacuum and hardly in the footsteps of much better films within the genre. Marked by the emotional complexity of a Michael Bay movie, Hunnan, del Toro and Co. shamble their way to the finish line, earning little sympathy or compassion along the way of this belly flop of an adventure. While it may appeal to the little boy in me, it just serves as a reminder as to how bad little boy’s taste in movies is.

D+