The original Pacific Rim wasn't a good movie, exactly. Considering that it was a movie about giant robots punching giant monsters, it was actually a bit, well, boring at times, centered, as it was, on the swaggering anti-charisma of leading man Charlie Hunnam.
But it was still watchable for little touches here and there. Director Guillermo del Toro was intricate as always in the world he was building; of more interest to this reviewer than the loud, brutish CGI mishmash that constituted the central action sequences was the production design and flourishes in the writing. The best stuff in Pacific Rim had nothing to do with missiles and monsters but the underground economy, the black market trading in kaiju parts, the mad scientists trying to figure out how to stop the world's end, the idea that our species was on the brink of extinction thanks to an external threat that showed no signs of slowing down any time soon.
Pacific Rim Uprising, which del Toro produced but did not direct, doesn't bother with anything superfluous like "interesting set design" or "inspired thinking about a world on the brink." It doesn't bother upgrading the lead—John Boyega's Jake Pentecost is a lateral move, at best, from Hunnam's Raleigh Becket, who is absent from this picture—and the supporting cast (Scott Eastwood, Tian Jing, Cailee Spaeny) constitutes a marked downgrade from its predecessor (Idris Elba, Max Martini, Ron Perlman, Clifton Collins). And the action sequences directed by Steven S. DeKnight feel more infrequent and more annoying, less coherent, less entertaining.
Pentecost (Boyega) is living in a coastal ruin, scavenging snacks and trying to steal parts of decommissioned Jaegers, the giant robots constructed to fight the kaiju menace from the previous film. During an attempted theft he encounters Amara Namani (Spaeny), an orphan who has built a mini-jaeger of her own. After being caught during their escapade, the pair is shipped off to a shatterdome, where the jaegers are stored.
He's been forcibly reenlisted to teach the next generation of jaeger pilots; she's been given the opportunity of a lifetime to step into the cockpit. And not a moment too soon! Something something kaijus are back something gotta stop them oh no and bang boom crash we have arrived at the end.
Now look: I'm not asking for Shakespeare, here. And I honestly think that the four (4!) credited writers have done something relatively surprising and interesting with the characters of Newt Geiszler (Charlie Day, the best, most amusing actor in this movie by an enormous margin) and Herman Gottlieb (Burn Gorman). I won't spoil it, but I do think the way they managed to reintroduce the kaiju menace is pretty amusing and no stupider than literally everything else in the film.
But it's those little touches of soul from the original that this sequel misses, those details imparted by del Toro that made the first film feel somewhat unique, a little bit alive. We don't even really spend any time marveling at the creature design or at the giant robots. There's one painfully awkward sequence in which Amara fangirls out at the giant robots, listing their names like they're celebrities. I grok the idea, but maybe we could have seen them in detail a bit more? Maybe we could have watched them in action for more than the final 25 minutes or so? Maybe we could have been given a reason to squee a bit?
Pacific Rim Uprising never feels like anything more than a sequel no one asked for to a movie that underperformed at the domestic box office meant to sell toys that no one will buy.