Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, 2013)

Gigantic monsters start sprouting out of a rift in the Pacific Ocean and mankind is plunged into years of escalating war, defended by giant robot warriors called Jaegers which take two neurally connected pilots to operate. Yes, Guillermo del Toro has decided to start a new franchise and this time he's taking on the combined Godzilla and Transformers production lines in the boomy style of Michael Bay. Everything from American football tactics through Battletech and WWF to samurai moves is thrown into the choreography mix, and it is pacy while being rather impressively stupid at the same time. 12-year-old boys will love it and not care in the slightest that the fight sequences make no sense, and it does have a certain gleeful appeal in its quite brazen melding of any monster or sci-fi action elements it likes the look of. But del Toro owes himself more than fishing for the Far Eastern robots and monsters market, and that too applies to Idris Elba as the commander of the defenders, who really wants to take a break from all this silliness before it's too late.

5/10