Pacific Rim: Uprising (Steven S. DeKnight, 2018)

The gigantic Kaiju monsters sprouting out from the middle of the Pacific are back, and so a new batch of plucky pilots of giant robots is needed to stop them. Incredibly, the plot in this sequel takes up even less space on a napkin than that of its predecessor: John Boyega is the son of the deceased hero Idris Elba, and he has issues with the interdimensional behemoths and his own past missteps, as he's pressganged to train a bunch of multinational teenagers (of course they are; the target audience is king) to do the job. The characters are tissue-thin, the action that ensues manages to be both nonsensical and boring, and the trillions of property damage depicted on the cities rampaged through make even what occurs in the Avengers films look like a spot of light DIY. By the time that the rail-guided plot reaches Mount Fuji, relocated to the edge of the suburbs of Tokyo, it's really quite hard to remain interested in what happens.

4/10