RSS

Movie Review: “Pacific Rim: Uprising”

24 Mar

“Pacific Rim: Uprising” is not a good movie, but I say that lovingly. It’s trash in the enjoyable matinee-movie sense, the type of movie that will run endlessly on TNT and that you won’t ever feel terribly inclined to switch off.

2013’s “Pacific Rim,” helmed by Guillermo del Toro, pitted waves of giant extradimensional monsters (“Kaiju”) against skyscraper-sized battle robots (“Jaegers”). “Uprising” picks up ten years after the first film’s “closing of the Breach,” which stopped the Kaiju influx at the cost of multiple Jaegers and their pilots. Enter Jake Pentecost (John Boyega), the son of Idris Elba’s character from the original film. Jake hasn’t exactly lived up to his father’s reputation: a washed-up Jaeger pilot candidate who now makes a living scavenging robot parts, he’s forced back into the ranks after an expedition with precocious youngster Amara (Cailee Spaeney) goes awry.

Lots of questions immediately emerge. Will a campaign to replace human-piloted Jaegers with automated drones (essentially a mashup of “Iron Man 2” and the fourth “Transformers” film) succeed? Will Jake ever learn to get along with fellow soldier Nate (Scott Eastwood)? Will Amara ever fit in with her fellow recruits (think “Ender’s Game”)? And if that weren’t enough, we also get appearances from original cast members Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), who’s now the UN Secretary-General, and eccentric scientist Newt Geiszler (Charlie Day).

In short, “Uprising” is a storytelling mess (and it doesn’t really know who its main characters are). But c’mon. You came here for robots beating up on things, and “Uprising” certainly has that in spades.

Within the film’s two-hour runtime, we get Jaegers battling rogue Jaegers, Jaegers battling hybrid Jaeger/Kaiju biomechanical monstrosities, and Jaegers battling Kaiju. Buildings topple, blue Kaiju blood sprays in all directions, and many, many things explode. If the idea of a 300-foot robot dismantling another 300-foot robot with flaming chainsaw swords floats your boat, you’re gonna have a good time. (I’m also perhaps inordinately partial to the film’s biomechanical robot battles: when you strip this particular film down to its bare constituents, it’s pretty much a glossy, extremely expensive Bionicle movie.)

But I will admit, this one really tested my willing suspension of disbelief.

Additionally, one great strength of the original film was that the stakes felt real; the entire movie was suffused with a sense of hopeless desperation. There was an undercurrent of panic underlying every battle as, one by one, Jaegers fell to Kaiju claws—with replacements in short supply. That’s just not the case in “Uprising,” which largely abandons its predecessor’s dark, rain-drenched palette for flamboyant neon colors. “Uprising” feels bigger, but at the same time less epic.

(Minor spoiler alert) There’s a particularly great moment at the end of the second act that involves multiple Breaches opening, multiple Kaiju invading, and multiple Jaegers running amok. And for the first and only time, I found myself genuinely wondering how our heroes would deal with this. Sure, the scenario reflects blatant sequelitis—“more is better!”—but the solution isn’t at all obvious. But alas, “Uprising” doesn’t have the courage to double down and raise its stakes that high. Instead, we get a fairly humdrum climax where the outcome is never really in doubt. More’s the pity.

Despite my full awareness that this is not a good film, I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. You very well might not. There’s nothing remotely thought-provoking or intellectually challenging about “Uprising” (unless you’re trying to figure out how a petite 15-year-old could construct a thirty-foot, battle-ready exoskeleton singlehandedly) and in many ways it reflects the lowest common denominator of Hollywood culture. Giant robots demolishing things are the lingua franca of a globalized film industry.

Maybe another time I’d feel more chastened by this realization. But today is not that day.

VERDICT: 6/10
No one will ever mistake “Uprising” for highbrow cinema, but hey, plasma cannons are cool.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on March 24, 2018 in Sci-Fi

 

Movie Review: “Death Wish”

04 Mar

In general, there are two ways to make a film about vigilantism. One is the straight-up empowerment fantasy, a celebration of man-against-the-odds mayhem that leaves the viewer exhilarated and defiant (Pierre Morel’s “Taken” springs to mind). The second is the tragedy, one that portrays unrestrained violence as an inevitably spiraling cycle of ruin (think James Wan’s “Death Sentence”).

But Eli Roth’s retelling of “Death Wish” charts a third course, hovering unsettlingly between pitiless satire and conventional shoot-‘em-up action. And in a strange way, that’s what makes it memorable.

A loose remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson film, this incarnation centers on Chicago trauma surgeon Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis). When Kersey’s wife and daughter are brutalized by masked attackers during a home invasion, he finds himself wracked with grief over his perceived inability to “protect what’s his.” The antidote: guns and vigilante violence. Leveraging the underworld know-how gained from his day job, Kersey begins a bloody campaign against Chicago’s criminals as he pursues those responsible for the attack on his home.

Certainly, this is a movie that relies heavily on its bloody gun battles (which are, for the most part, well-choreographed). And in this most straightforward, superficial sense, it’s a passable B-movie that might be worth a Redbox rental. But just like Roth’s last film, “The Green Inferno,” there’s definitely more going on here than meets the eye.

There are parts of “Death Wish” that are virtually impossible to interpret as anything other than satirical. At one point, for instance, Kersey strolls into a gun shop. A busty blonde clerk invites him to buy any gun he wants that very day, assuring him that “no one ever fails” their concealed-carry test. A swipe at what Roth perceives to be too-lax gun regulations? Obviously. But Roth’s social critique doesn’t stop there, as he takes jabs at both police bias and the valorization of mass violence on social media.

The real punch of “Death Wish,” though, rests in its pitiless depiction of right-wing ideology unmoored from any moral underpinnings. Kersey doesn’t fight out of any real love or sense of place or tradition, but rather for his people; his wife and daughter are simply members of his tribe that he must defend. (In a particularly garish moment, Kersey even violently reclaims “his stuff” from a pawnshop, leaving corpses in his wake.)

And no transcendent values hold him back. During a funeral service, Kersey defiantly declares that no divine plan can account for his family’s suffering. Shortly thereafter, the camera lingers on a Baptist church poster advertising a gun buyback program—the exact opposite of what Kersey’s interested in. And when police detectives urge him to “have faith” that his family’s attackers will be brought to justice, Kersey stabs an accusing finger at the wall of cold cases behind them. “What did faith do for them?” he snarls. In this profoundly godless “conservatism,” there can be no room for forgiveness or reconciliation: only the lex talionis.

Naturally, the film’s climax, in which Kersey’s home is attacked a second time, plays out in power-fantasy style. This time, Kersey is armed to the teeth, blasting away villain after villain with no legal consequences (and yes, most of them are minorities). It’s an alt-right fever dream, a vision for which Roth clearly has little sympathy.

At bottom, like most of Roth’s films, “Death Wish” is a fairly misanthropic endeavor. Few viewers will inquire into this film’s politics or religious sensibilities: it features Bruce Willis dealing out damage, and that’s good enough for them. Yet I appreciate that Roth’s movies (well, at least some of them) have the nerve to actually say things about culture in an era where mass appeal is the name of the game. For better or worse, there’s more intellectual coherence in “Death Wish” than in last week’s “Annihilation.” And that, in my book, is a curious and sobering thing.

VERDICT: 6.5/10
Not exactly highbrow entertainment, but certainly more than meets the eye.

 
Leave a comment

Posted by on March 4, 2018 in Thrillers

 
← Older posts
Newer posts →