ReelBob: ‘Pacific Rim: Uprising’ ★

By Bob Bloom

When you have reviewed movies for as long as I have, your reactions vary from exhilaration to disappointment to disgust.

But being sad and angry about a film rarely surfaces — until now.

I loved 2013’s “Pacific Rim,” giving it 3½ stars and praising Guillermo del Toro’s direction, writing and overall concept.

Unfortunately, the recent Academy Award-winning director has little to do with this stupefying inept sequel — and it shows, as director Steven S. DeKnight cannot hold a candle to del Toro.

“Pacific Rim: Uprising” is sloppy and incompetent. It plays like a Saturday-matinee kids’ show, borrowing bits and pieces from “Transformers” movies, “Independence Day: Resurgence” and “Power Rangers”-style offerings.

It features dumbed-down, grade-school science, an almost incoherent plot that makes little sense and characters mostly defined by their gender and ethnicity.

The movie is insipid and lazy, coasting by on the reputation of its predecessor. It makes no effort, but, instead, it offers by-now formulaic special-effects destruction and clichéd-robot-on-robot and robot-on-monster battles that level cities.

The film is set 10 years after the first movie in which the Kaiju were defeated by stalwart Jaeger pilots.

Parts of the world have been rebuilt, but other places are ignored. It’s an odd landscape — sunny skies, half-destroyed mansions, Kaiju skeletons left to rot, and decommissioned Jaegers abandoned to rust.

The force that protected mankind from the Kaiju is still around, maintaining Jaegers — for what purpose is never explained — as a new program is being developed to replace pilots with drones.

Basically, the first two-thirds of this 111-minute movie deals with a lot of technological intrigue and skullduggery, leading you down a garden path, trying to figure out who’s the real villain and what’s the bad guys endgame.

Here’s the problem: Where the hell are the damn Kaiju? I don’t know about you, but I came to see a movie similar to the original, in which giant man-piloted machines battle it out with humongous Godzilla-like creatures from another dimension.

It’s like “Pacific Rim: Uprising” tried to blend two completely different scripts into one cohesive whole. The movie’s parts are as compatible as installing a 767’s jet engine on a riding mower.

The acting is on par with the rest of the movie. John Boyega stars as Jake Pentecost, son of the hero of the original. He is a walking cliché, dropping out of the Jaeger program because he could not live up to his father’s heroics.

Another problem is that half the time you cannot understand what Boyega’s character is saying. Whether it’s the actor or the movie’s soundtrack is debatable.

Newcomer Cailee Spaeny is Amara, the now-recognizable and cliched 15-year-old tech whiz who is recruited into service.

The rest of the characters are interchangeable, with a few familiar faces returning from the original.

Plus, any film in which the main villain cannot be taken seriously is doomed from the outset.

“Pacific Rim: Uprising” is unimaginative, simplistic, routine and cartoonish.

It may make you angry enough to scream and knock things over or simply close your eyes, ignore the screen and mentally swim in your recollections of the original.

Either way, “Uprising” comes up short on all accounts. Like the Kaiju, it should be buried and forgotten.

I am a member of the Indiana Film Journalists Association. My reviews appear at ReelBob (reelbob.com) and Rottentomatoes (www.rottentomatoes.com). I also review Blu-rays and DVDs. I can be reached by email at bobbloomjc@gmail.com or on Twitter @ReelBobBloom. Links to my reviews can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING
1 star out of 4
(PG-13), science fiction action, violence and destruction, language