Pacific Rim (12A) **
Directed by: Guillermo del Toro Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi
Guillermo del Toro’s most distinctive visions (Cronos, Pan’s Labyrinth)
have always emerged from darkness and silence – so why has he given into making
the same loud noises as everybody else? The trailer pegged Pacific Rim as Godzilla-vs.-Transformers; what makes the film the
summer’s biggest disappointment yet is that it’s equally indistinguishable
from, say, Real Steel meets Battleship. Here, human-piloted robots
clash with sea monsters: our bereaved pilot hero (Hunnam) re-enters battle
alongside a female partner (Kikuchi), whose presence presumably makes the
subsequent bangs and crashes more appealing to the Asian market.
There are fun footnotes – cities get clogged with monster dung – but any
nuance or emotion gets squashed amid rusty plot thrusts and splurgey effects.
The actors come cheap and uninteresting: we’re meant to be stirred by Elba’s
rewording of Bill Pullman’s Independence
Day peptalk, though it’s hard to cheer Hunnam’s squadron of sandy-haired
Paul Walker wannabes. Marginally better-natured than every other spot of
dollar-chasing out there, it’ll nevertheless stand as del Toro’s most
anonymous, safest bet to date: if you’ve seen any of the films mentioned above,
there’s barely a surprise to be sprung from it.
Pacific Rim is in cinemas nationwide.
No comments:
Post a Comment