At the opening of this pointless, charmless sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s halfway decent original, we are introduced to a new character. Teen tech genius Amara (Cailee Spaeny) has cobbled together her own “jaeger” from bits of the scrapped battle robots crippled in the last war with the Kaiju (giant alien lizards prone to destroying buildings). But her version is less impressive on every level and, frankly, not fit for purpose. It’s hard to think of a more fitting metaphor for this crude botch job of a film.
Not even John Boyega, deploying weapons grade charm as the renegade son of the previous film’s war hero, Stacker Pentecost, can redeem this thunderously dumb movie. It’s saying something if a movie that doesn’t need to be much beyond mindlessly entertaining can only deliver the mindless part of the requirement. It makes you yearn for the nuance and complex characterisation of the Transformers series.
