Video review: "Pacific Rim Uprising"

“Pacific Rim” was one of the best science fiction/action movies of the past decade, a rousing war between giant human-controlled robots and invading alien behemoths, but its unnecessary sequel is a pale shadow. It expels stars Charlie Hunnam and Rinko Kikuchi (except for a cameo by the latter), the screenwriting team and director Guillermo del Toro (“The Shape of Water”).

It’s rarely a good thing when a movie swaps out its entire creative team and most of the cast, and my fears were well-founded.

It’s still a decent popcorn movie, with TV veteran Steven S. DeKnight (“Daredevil”) taking over as director and also co-writing the script (along with Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder and T.S. Nowlin). John Boyega of “Star Wars” fame assumes the lead role as the son of Idris Elba’s commanding Stacker Pentecost, playing wayward Jake.

As the film opens, it’s 10 years after the menacing kaiju monsters were defeated and the portal into their world sealed. For some reason, the world has continued to build jaeger robots and train humans to pilot them. There seems little strategic value in this, other than preparing for a movie sequel.

Jake, who’s been spending his time scrounging and partying, gets recruited back into the jaeger program, where he butts heads with old adversary, straitlaced Nate (Scott Eastwood). Much macho strutting ensues. Tagging along is Amara (Cailee), a teen rascal who’s been building her own (smaller) jaegers out of scrap parts.

The dweeby scientist duo of Newton and Hermann is back (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman), pretty much the only returning cast members with significant parts. Tian Jing plays the CEO of an evil jaeger-building corporation that wants to help save the word, and lighten its pocketbook.

The beast-vs.-mech throwdowns are still a lot of fun, though I was disappointed the jaegers have gotten a lot smoother and more civilized since last time. I liked when they were clanky and slow, looking like something people had built. There are more group battles but less gore, which is good and bad, respectively, at least if you’re a fan of this stuff.

I don’t know why they made “Pacific Rim Uprising.” The last movie tied things up in a nice bow, and this sequel just unravels the knot for no good reason. It’s entertaining, but forgettable.

Bonus features are rather nice. There’s a feature-length commentary audio track by DeKnight and a handful of deleted scenes with more commentary by the director. It also comes with 10 making-of documentary shorts, touching on various aspects of production, deeper dives into some of the supporting characters, and more.

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Review: "Pacific Rim: Uprising"

I approached "Pacific Rim: Uprising" with a mix of fear and optimism. I absolutely adored the first film from five years ago, in which skyscraper-sized monsters and robots face off against each other. It was like turning the dial back to my childhood, watching Ultraman paste some prehistoric critter, but with 8,000 percent better production values.

But I was surprised a sequel was even being made. The first one did not do spectacularly well at the box office, though I think it did better on video. Director Guillermo Del Toro is not involved, other than the obligatory producer credit and presumed check, with TV/streaming veteran Steven S. DeKnight ("Daredevil") taking over the helm. He brought in his own writing team, none of whom worked on the first film, and shares a script credit himself.

All that is not exactly... reassuring.

As I settled in to watch, I was anticipating how the new set of filmmakers would address the obvious challenge of a sequel: how the world would suddenly have more jaegers, the giant metal machines controlled by twin human pilots, now that the kaiju creatures had all been defeated and the breach into their universe sealed at the end of the last movie.

After all, it's easy to come up with some science fiction-y reason why the breach could be reopened and new monsters roam the Earth. Less simple to explain how mammoth jaegers that probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars and years to build suddenly materialize, especially when they're no longer needed.

Curiously, the approach the creative team used to overcome this storytelling obstacle was... to just ignore it.

Yep. Really.

As the movie opens, it's 10 years later and there have been no new kaiju. The busted-up parts of civilization have been rebuilt and peace is at hand. And the reconstituted jaeger program is up and running smoothly with dozens of new models and pilot teams.

Wait, what?

Why the frick would nations devote large chunks of their economies to a military option that is now unnecessary? It's almost like the entire international community was anticipating a movie sequel.

It seems mostly what the new jaegers do is patrol junkyards of old jaegers to keep miscreants from stealing parts to build their own much smaller, crappier jaegers, which they then use to... well, we're not actually told what they do with them. Rob banks? Impress their neighbors? Guard still smaller junkyards against the possibility of even tinier scrap jaegers?

The whole concept is like its own infinity loop.

One of the rascals building their own jaegers is Amara Namani, a teenage castoff played by Cailee Spaeny, who looks like some studio chief hollered, "Get me a Hailee Steinfeld clone, but younger!" Her jaeger, which she has dubbed Scrapper, can roll himself into a ball and do all sorts of parkour-style flips and tricks.

In general, the jaegers look much less like the clanky robots built by humans from the first film, and more like free-flowing action heroes. Basically, the franchise has gone Transformers.

Amara runs in with Jake Pentacost (John Boyega, back to his hard-to-understand natural British accent), who from his name we know is the wayward son of Stacker Pentacost, the badass jaeger chief played by Idris Elba. He used to be in the program but got kicked out, spending his days hunting jaeger scrap to fund his partying. But much like Charlie Hunnan's Riley, he gets an improbable jump to the front of the line and finds himself back in the pilot's seat.

(Speaking of Riley, no word on why he's not in this movie. Spoiler: His partner, Mako Mori, gets one of those walk-on-and-promptly-die treatments.)

Scott Eastwood plays Nate, the new head jaeger ranger, who has history with Jake that will get played out in a lot of Y-chromosome quips and strutting. Amara joins the crew of cadets, who are a nice spectrum of brown skin tones, except for Victoria, the snarly Russian she clashes with. I learn Victoria is played by Ivanna Sakhno, after I had assumed the Olsen sisters had spontaneously created another sibling to keep he chain going.

The only characters from the first movie back in a meaningful way are the two dweeby scientists, Hermann Gottlieb (Burn Gorman) and Newton Geiszler (Charlie Day). Gottlieb is still working for the jaeger program, while Newt has sold out to be an expert with Shao Industries, whose imperious CEO (Tian Jing) wants to replace the jaeger pilots with remote-controlled substitutes.

The action scenes are still a lot of fun, and we get to see teams of jaegers go up against a group of kaiju, which isn't something we really got to see before. We get to ooh and ahh at all the new variants of monsters and robots. Disappointingly, I registered a steep drop in the level of kaiju blood 'n' guts compared to the original film.

"Pacific Rim: Uprising" isn't a terrible sequel, but one that wears its commerciality without much camouflage. It's pretty rare to make a great movie, have almost everybody involved in it leave and come up with a decent sequel. Especially when you don't even bother to explain the premise.

Review: "The Longest Ride"

Movies based on Nicholas Sparks books tend to be short on brainpower but long on emotional tug. "The Longest Yard" is the best one since "The Notebook," making up most of the yardage in smarts without sacrificing too much in the way of passion.

Like all Sparks flicks, it centers around a volatile relationship between two young people from different worlds. It also borrows the familiar technique of giving us a parallel story of another love from another time, with connections between the two growing stronger as the film goes on.

It stars Britt Robertson and Scott Eastwood as one couple in the current time, while Oona Chaplin and Jack Huston are the antique pair.

If some of those names sound familiar, that's because they are. Chaplin is the granddaughter of the great Charlie Chaplin, and Eastwood is the son of Clint Eastwood. (I thought Huston might be one of the Hollywood Hustons, John/Danny/Angelica, but no, he's a Brit.)

Overall it's a nice cast, with each couple sharing warm chemistry between them. It also features Alan Alda in the old man role, and he's quite effective in an understated way.

The story is this: Sophia (Robertson), smart art student from Wake Forest meets Carolina bull rider Luke (Eastwood). They fall hard for each other, but she's soon headed to New York to work at a gallery, while he's chasing the elusive championship after some very hard knocks. On the way home from a magical first date, they rescue Ira (Alda), an old man whose car has run off the road, along with a box of old letters.

While visiting Ira in the hospital, Sophia reads the letters to him, which chronicle the tale of his lifelong love, Ruth (Chaplin). Part of the close-knit Jewish community in Greensboro in the 1940s, they fell in love themselves and started a life together, but not without certain challenges and tragedies along the way. Huston takes over the role of Ira as a youngster.

"Love requires sacrifice -- always," says elder Ira, in the sort of movie where characters just blurt out its main theme.

In the case of Luke and Sophia, that means he must give up the ranch and cracking his skulls falling off bulls, and she has to shelve her dreams of curating great art, or both.

Robertson is a charismatic and likeable star. Her face looks like a cross between Lena Headey ("Game of Thrones") and Linda Hamilton, and she has the spunk of a young Reese Witherspoon about her. Eastwood is like a prettier version of his dad, and much of the early going involves both cowgirls and college girls growing woozy at the sight of him. His acting's a bit stiff in the talkie scenes, but again, just like pop.

The Chaplin/Huston pairing is even better, enhanced by spectacular period costumes, cars and sets. Director George Tillman Jr. ("Men of Honor") shows off Sparks' North Carolina backyard in all its sun-dappled gorgeousness. He even manages to capture the frenetic, bestial grace of bull riding -- though, like the quarter mile races in "The Fast and the Furious," those 8-second rides somehow get stretched out to a minute of screen time.

"The Longest Ride" is a big cinematic piece of caramel-covered melted cheese, unapologetically sweet and sappy. But it will cause warm swells in the heart and a tear or two to be shed.

Review: "Fury"

One of my favorite things to do as a critic is to point people to great movies they’ve probably never heard of. Case in point: “End of Watch,” which was in and out of theaters so fast in 2012 you probably missed it even if you didn’t blink.

Writer/director David Ayer’s next film, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Sabotage,” similarly disappeared without a trace. I’m hoping that won’t be the case with his latest, “Fury,” a World War II action/drama starring Brad Pitt that mostly takes place inside a single Sherman tank.

Fair notice: this a grim, dark movie about the dank corners hidden away inside men’s souls. It makes “Saving Private Ryan” seem like a lullaby.

The battle scenes are gruesome, and what happens when the shooting stops is often even more troubling. American soldiers are portrayed not as decent men who sometimes commit evil deeds in the heat of combat, but killing machines who only want to murder the Germans before the krauts murder them.

What a pitiable world Ayers has drawn for us. Unlike most WWII movies that are set when the Nazis still have the upper hand, here it’s April 1945 and the Germans are offering their stiffest resistance before the collapse they know is inevitable.

The soldiers are all scarred, grimy beasts; the German landscape is an open wound, ripped and gasping; the detritus of war lies all around, smoking armored hulks like prehistoric behemoths brought low. It’s not so much that death and carnage are everywhere, but everywhere is death and carnage.

To wit: when the fresh young recruit, Norman (Logan Lerman), is assigned to the crew of the “Fury,” the battered tank that has survived many battles, his first duty is to clean out the bloody mess left by his predecessor. While doing so, he finds part of the man’s face, perfectly intact, staring at him.

So again I say: not for the squeamish, this.

Pitt has a stout, merciless role as Don, aka “Wardaddy,” the sergeant who commands the Fury. His face done up with scars and hair chopped in a deliberately unattractive fop with shaved sides, Don is sure-handed and unrelenting with the enemy, and the same with his crew. He’ll let them bicker and bitch, but when it’s time for them to perform he will brook no hesitation.

When Norman fails to spot and kill a German soldier with an anti-tank gun, and absolutely horrific results ensue, Don makes personally sure that the lad will not flinch next time, using brutal but effective means. He’ll let the Neanderthal gunner, Grady (Jon Bernthal), indulge his base instincts, but only up to a point.

Don takes a softer hand with Bible, a thoughtful young man played thoughtfully by Shia LaBeouf, and Gordo (Michael Peña), the rock-solid tank driver. The sergeant has promised all his men he will keep them alive, but their latest mission will test that pledge.

The Fury is assigned to a platoon of five tanks to guard a crossroads against a force of fresh German troops, who are threatening the advancing division’s supply line. If they fail, the entire Allied advance will ground to a halt and the war could last months longer.

Ayer shows an expert hand for the battle scenes, keeping the focus on the men inside the Fury while giving a pulse-jumping view of the action outside. Tracer bullets and ordnance flash at the screen like lasers, lending the proceedings an eerie stuck-out-of-time feeling. An encounter with a technologically superior Panzer Tiger is especially effective.

The movie works better as a war picture than a character piece. We never quite get all the way inside the heads of the characters, so their peril doesn’t carry as much emotional freight as you’d expect. And a scene inside the apartment of a German woman and her cousin goes in many different directions at once, like a grenade, rather than focused, like a sniper’s bullet.

Still, this is one depiction of war destined to linger in our memory. At times this movie almost seems like a pugnacious middle finger to the classic war epics, in which disparate men come together for a violent but altruistic cause. “Fury” crushes the notion of the nobility of war under its grinding, pitiless treads.