Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)

Jake Pentecost (John Boyega whose performance only isn’t the most lifeless and dull one in a movie full of lifeless performances because Scott Eastwood is even more of a zombie), rogue yet boring – and retconned in so the lazy script can include Hollywood’s daddy issues fixation - son of Pacific Rim’s Stacker Pentecost is roped in to help train a bunch of teen cadets as the next generation of Jaeger pilots. They may or may not be obsolete soon, for a Chinese company has invented piloted drone Jaegers. Returning to die – and if you think that’s a spoiler you haven’t seen any movies at all, have you? – Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi) isn’t quite convinced of the concept. Soon a mysterious evil – it is painted black, after all - Jaeger attacks, and other supposedly exciting things are bound to happen later on.

As someone who liked Guillermo del Toro’s original Pacific Rim quite a bit (well, actually loved it to bits), I was going into Steven S. DeKnight’s sequel with a degree of optimism despite the bad write-ups for the film at the time it came out. Alas, this one’s really just barely better than a Transformers film of the Michael Bay era, dropping basically every bit of interesting world building (drift compatibility between pilots as a form of intimacy for example is written out completely except for one scene that repeats a plot beat from the first film but much worse), and misusing the returning characters badly. As a matter of fact, quite a bit of the film feels as if the filmmakers feel more than just a little loathing for the first one and go out of their way to tell you. It’s not just the identity of the villain – whose plans and actions being undetected by the way makes no logical sense whatsoever even if you’re applying tolerant blockbuster logic – or the undignified way Kikuchi’s character is written out, the film’s whole approach to mecha, kaiju and human beings is unpleasant and cynical where del Toro’s film goes out of its way to be anything but.

One might think the high diversity of the kids playing the cadets would at least be a nice step in the right direction, but the script just doesn’t bother to provide anyone with any characterisation going beyond their skin colour at all. This thing’s so badly done, you often don’t even know who is supposed to be in which mecha. The writing as a whole is atrocious: there’s no concept of how a film can make shorthand characterisation work, the plotting is vague, inconsistent and anti-dramatic, and there’s nothing here that doesn’t come directly out of the big book of Hollywood blockbuster clichés. Now, the first film did use said book quite a bit too, but it also knew how to give a cliché a little twist and how to put some heart and excitement into it when done straight. Where the first film understood clichés and knew how to use them creatively, Uprising just reproduces them, badly.

The mecha and kaiju action are a huge step backwards, too. It’s supposedly bigger, better and more fun, but in actuality, there’s no heft, no excitement and no verve to any of the action set pieces. They are joyless, pointless and lack any sense of wonder. Which actually make them perfect fit for the rest of Uprising.

Kill (2008)

Original title: Kiru

This Mamoru Oshii produced and financed omnibus movie contains four unconnected shorts by four directors.

The first one is called "Kilico" and directed by Takanori Tsujimoto (him of the pretty swell Hard Revenge Milly movies). Professional assassin Kilina (Miki Mizuno - Milly herself) has had some sort of falling out with her boss, who reacts by kidnapping her sailor suit school uniform wearing sister Kilico (Ayaka Morita). Kilina comes to the rescue, but both she and her sister end up horribly wounded and are left for dead by their enemies. Some friendly (or is he?) mad scientist makes the best out of a problematic situation and puts Kilina's brain in Kilico's body - probably to create the ultimate in sword-swinging schoolgirls.

Not surprisingly, the still quite lethal Kilina goes back to her boss to take her vengeance on him for the murder of her sister, but that's more difficult than you'd expect in a brain-swapping world.

I'm still quite impressed by director Tsujimoto's ability to get quite a bit of entertainment value out of some properly good fighting even though it takes place in the usual drab corridors, car parking lots and warehouse locations his generation of Japanese exploitation filmmakers has to work with. "Kilico" is no great shakes, but it has verve and a certain amount of style. Furthermore, Tsujimoto has obvious fun with the small amount of (very Japanese) freakishness his (even smaller) small budget allows, which is just the sort of thing to make me happy.

The second short film is called "Kodomo-Zamurai" and directed by Kinji Fukasaku's son Kenta, who is something of a hit-or-miss director with me. In this case, it's more of a hit. 6th grader Ryutaro is the earnest modern heir of a samurai clan but has - to the dismay of his family - sworn never to draw his sword. That's a promise no child can keep when an evil bully terrorizes his new school, his love interest, his comical sidekick and his little sister, so carnage ensues. The whole story is told in form of a silent movie, complete with a fake 1920s film look, and narrated (after all, that's how Japanese silent movies were shown in their time, being not all that silent) by Vanilla Yamazaki. Yamazaki is really pretty fantastic, with comical timing and an enthusiasm so great it's even obvious to a non-speaker of Japanese like me.

Fukasaku has quite a bit of fun playing with the form, using it to produce merry twenty minutes of children doing - on paper - terrible things to each other and make fun of films earnestly praising the samurai ethos.

After these fine efforts by Tsujimoto and Fukasaku, Kill gets dragged down by the last two parts.

In Minoru Tahara's (of whom I know nothing at all) "Zan-Gun", an evil sword possesses a soldier and merges with his gun into a sword-gun/gun-sword with which he becomes a successful serial killer. Another guy becomes possessed by the sword's arch enemy dagger, so they fight until one of them wins. The end. Yeah, well, this is basically one barely decent fight scene (in a drab corridor) that doesn't evoke any reaction beyond a shrug in me.

Last and possibly least is Mamoru Oshii's own entry, "Assault Girl 2". A nameless woman with a sword (Yoko Fujita) sits in a field, looks at the sky, and then looks at the sky some more. The camera stares at her face (understandable but not exciting) and shows some metaphorically loaded animals. Then our heroine stands up, slices a tank in two and fights another, SM chic-wearing woman (Rinko Kikuchi). Both grow wings and fly away. The end. As much as I love and admire Oshii's anime work (and I really do), all of his live action work I've ever encountered has rubbed me completely the wrong way.

The pacing drags, what is supposed to be beautiful and symbolic is mostly kitschy and Oshii's metaphors are about as subtle and ambiguous as sledgehammers. Especially the latter is always a bit of a surprise to me - Oshii's anime do after all show an artist quite capable of doing complex and ambiguous work instead of hollow pretentiousness. On the positive side, Oshii does at least include pretty women doing violence in everything he does.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: The first 11 minutes will absolutely shock you. The last 11 minutes will rivet you to your seat.

The Brothers Bloom (2008): I suspect there's only two ways people can go with this one - either they'll fall in love with Rian Johnson's highly stylized and playful film about lies and stories so good they can become the truth, or they'll call it pretentious and be annoyed by its obvious cleverness. Me, I'll never be found among those saying even a single bad word about a film that can pull off a karaoke version of the Band's "Sleeping".

Man of Vendetta (2010): The directorial debut of Woo Min-ho has most of the qualities I associate with South Korean thrillers: it's as slickly directed as any major Hollywood film, but much more willing to go into really nasty and unpleasant places without needing to wallow in the nastiness more than is necessary. It's acted excellently by a cast that knows the difference between "sparse" and "wooden". It has a script that doesn't feel the need to always add another twist if that twist would be to the detriment of mood and characters, yet still knows and uses all the tricks of its genre.

Still, while I can and do admire these achievements, Man of Vendetta never clicked with me emotionally. It might be that the film's keeping of its child-kidnapping and murdering psycho something of a cipher without backstory makes it difficult for me to be all that frightened of or shocked by him, or just that the "lone civilian fights psycho for his little daughter" format is quite played out, even if its realized this technically proficient. For whatever reason, my admiration never turned into actually caring, and a film that was supposed to have an emotional impact just didn't.

Cyborg Girl (2008): Speaking of movies that don't have the emotional impact their directors seem to want them to have easily leads to this Japanese science fiction comedy romance melodrama (no, really) with Haruka Ayase and Keisuke Koide, directed by South Korean Jae-young Kwak whom you might know from My Sassy Girl. Guy falls in love with a time-travelling android built by his own future self to safe himself from serious bodily harm and a major disaster that is pretty uncomfortable to watch this shortly after the Japanese earthquake. Hilarity, a bit of friendly violence (yay!) and cloying, overly drawn-out sentimentality ensues. And no, there's nothing at all creepy about the film's set-up, at least nothing Kwak (also responsible for the script) knows of. Though the two leads really do their best with what they are given, Cyborg Girl is just too overloaded to get the tears out of me that it wants its audience so badly to cry. I'm perfectly willing to be moved by a weirdly artificial tragedy, but the film's tendency to just wallow in it all the time feels cynical and manipulative where it's supposed to be sad and heart-warming. The here melodrama just feels terribly artificial in all the wrong ways.

 

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