Guillermo Del Toro's "Pacific Rim" is, to my mind, one of his weaker films - suffering from a very bland protagonist in Charlie Hunnam and a lot overly complicated story elements for what should be a pretty simple "robots versus monsters" battlefest. But it does have some compensations, in particular Idris Elba being iconically heroic as the cheif of the battle robots in straight facedly delivering the words "We're cancelling the apocalyse", and a fun sideplot featuring scientists Charlie Day and Burn Gorman with Ron Pearlman as a sleazy wheeler-dealer.
The sequel loses Idris, Charlie and Ron but keeps Charlie and Burn, moving the action 10 years later and giving us a return bout of fighting between a new generation of robots and monsters. John Boyega takes over leading man duties and gives the part way more charisma than it really deserves - this is, in all honesty, a pretty thinly written bad-boy lead, but Boyega has so much charm it makes him surprisingly non-objectionable. Scott Eastwood is the by-the-book chief and is rather bland, as are a succession of new pilots (who may avoid the national stereotyping Del Toro indulged in, but with nothing coming in to replace it, it just makes for a whole sea of bland). THe monster-robot fighting, which is what you're here for, is reasonable but there aren't quite any great standout moments that make this particularly different from any other times you've seen two giant things slug it out. The location of the final battle, perhaps, at least pays a nice tribute to the obvious source for much of these types of films, but still... this is a middling to poor film that's elevated by a charismatic leading man to be watchable, rather than anything I can comfortably recommend to anybody not intrinsically interested in the robot-monster fighting.
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