Pacific Rim 3D (DQ)

Stars: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Ron Perlman, Rob Kazinsky, Max Martini, Clifton Collins Jr, Burn Gorman, Larry Joe Campbell, Brad William Henke

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Amazing in its technical design and variety of monsters and awesome in its sets, but otherwise pretty ropy, this (very) guilty pleasure is like a Japanese Godzilla film from the 1960s on a multi-million dollar budget. Appropriately, the heroine (the Oscar-nominated Kikuchi) is Japanese and many of the fleeing crowds were shot in Hong Kong.

It's the near future, and gigantic reptilian monsters have risen from the depths of the earth beneath the Pacific, trashing cities and killing millions. To combat the menace, the authorities greenlight the constructing of huge state-of-the-art automatons called jaegers, operated by two pilots with symbiotic minds.

As the monsters increase and evolve, the jaegers begin to lose their battles and are deemed obsolete, to the disgust of Raleigh (Hunnam) whose brother and co-pilot has just been killed in combat. A huge Pacific wall is constructed as an alternative, but the monsters trample right through it, and suddenly the jaegers are needed again - to implement a desperate plan to drop a nuclear device deep below the Pacific into the creatures' lair.

The film is full of shouting and over-acting - there's hardly a good performance in it - but it scarcely matters, as the story is pretty much non-stop combat action throughout on a gigantic scale. If you look forward to colossal scaly monsters spouting luminous blue fire battling giant jaegers, in bone and metal-shattering action, as they knock blue blazes out of one another, then this is definitely the movie for you.

Script? What script? 'Vengeance is like an open wound,' growls Commander Elba (still with his Luther voice), as he contemplates the final sacrifice. That's about the best of it too. Otherwise it's not so much mumbo-jumbo as hokum-pokum. As you stagger out of the cinema, you may feel more battered into exhaustion than watching the Murray vs Djokovic tennis final.

David Quinlan

USA 2013. UK Distributor: Warner Brothers. Technicolor.
132 minutes. Not widescreen. UK certificate: 12A.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 0, Violence/Horror 2, Drugs 0, Swearing 0.

Review date: 09 Jul 2013