Director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy) has managed to miss the mark completely with his latest film, Pacific Rim. While the visuals, as expected, are stunning and some of the fight sequences very cool, the film is a cinematic one-note and one that often feels flat.
Premise: Monsters from another dimension emerge from the depths of the Pacific Ocean and Earth responds by building giant robots. Result: Cool visuals, premise, visuals, and some scenes simply do not survive everything else that went wrong.
Pacific Rim is based in a world that thankfully does not currently exist: a rift in the tectonic plates below the Pacific Ocean has somehow opened a dimensional portal through which horrifying, gigantic monsters, known as Kaiju, emerge and destroy. They are terrifying and each moment they are on screen, audiences will feel deeply unsettled.
The world, reeling from these attacks, decides that conventional warfare just won’t do against these mega-beasts and so pools its vast resources to create Jaegers (or Hunter in German), gigantic robots that stalk and kill these beasts. These Jaegers, as luck would have it, must be controlled by two pilots who have essentially mind-melded with each other and essentially the machine.
Enter our heroes, Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) and his brother Yancey (Diego Klattenhoff) who fight bravely, until one day when a battle with a Kaiju ends Raleigh’s career and Yancey’s life. Years later, it would appear that the world is changing and Jaeger’s are no longer en vogue as the defenders of Human Kind. But the leader of the program, Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba), a fan of pontifications and catch phrases if there ever was one, won’t go down without the proverbial “fight.”
He re-recruits Beckett since Jaeger’s and their pilots are in short supply. The film then drowns audiences with countless characters and converging plotlines: There is obvious plotlines around “getting back in the game” characterized by Beckett and himself, Beckett and Pentecost, and Beckett and his strange, supposed connection with Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), a woman who seems incapable of communicating via mouth in favor of giant eyes and quivering lashes.
Next, the inevitable conflict with the “big dawgs in town” as Beckett contrasts with a rambunctious Chuck Hansen (Robert Kazinsky) and to a lesser extent his Father and partner Herc Hansen (Max Martini). At times the script seems frighteningly Paint-By- Numbers.
Finally, there is the the mad scientist plotline between Pentecost and his two clichéd brainiacs in Dr. Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day) and Gottlieb (Burn Gorman), who look written out of a dime novel from the Twenties. For no reason at all, they are sent into the world to deal with Mafioso Hannibal Chau (Ron Perlman) who controls all the Kaiju carcasses. Two BIG issues: one, why does this plotline even exists in the first place (other than a superfluous Perlman cameo)?
But worst is the name Hannibal Chao? Not only does this sound like a derivative of the Ryan Reynolds character in Blade, but Perlman actually explains that he named himself for his favorite war general (we assume the Carthaginian) and his favorite Chinese restaurant. Is this what passes for funny in movies today? Gun. Temple. Trigger. Pulled. Splatter.
Del Toro and team do manage a few positive notes amidst the messy story. The Kaiju are scary, the robots are cool, and the fight sequences, when pulled off are exciting. There is constantly the sense of foreboding and as the plot heightens there is an unmistakable exhilaration that permeates. This, along with an interesting premise (one would expect nothing less from Del Toro) helps to keep this film from complete catastrophe.
Nevertheless, there is just too much internal to this film that doesn’t work; not the least of which is the acting. Hunnan seems lost in this role, as does Elba, both of whom spout out lines without conviction but with complete confusion. To say Kikuchi is miscast for this film is like saying Stalin was mean.; and her complete lack of chemistry with Hunnan is almost palpable. Day gets louder rather than better as the film progresses and Gorman literally consumes a third of the scenery before the second act is through.
Perlman is Perlman; we get it, we like it well enough. We move on. Kazinski and Martini are fine, somehow escaping the thespian black hole that manifested in this film. To this point, on some level the blame must come to both the writing and squarely on the direction since these actors have been strong elsewhere and further, they are all not good here. It is a sad reality that on some level there was system failure at the helm.
Overall, this film is a hard pass. The resolution focused on all sorts of theoretical science which we are fine accepting on some level but ultimately just feels like it was taken from a fortune cookie; perhaps from Chao’s. Ultimately, while the film has its cool moments and fun action sequence, all the sinews and connections in this film ruin the fun. They distract and cheapen a beautiful film and ultimately make us long for less budget and more substance.
Rating: 4 – A case of PBR and a “Dear John” letter
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