Let's get straight to the point: I think this movie is trash. Not even good, enjoyable trash: it's boring, plodding, shoddily-acted, clichéd trash.
All the new characters barely have five personality traits between every single one of them: they're universally fairly bland, and only John Boyega manages to coast through the movie on sheer natural charisma alone (seeing him play opposite the charisma vacuum that is Scott Eastwood is interesting in that regard). The returning characters give pretty okay performances, but their presence really drives the new protagonists' blandness home: I wished I was watching a movie solely about them instead. A movie that any of them was enthusiastic about doing, preferably, because I could feel Burn Gorman and Charlie Day wished they were in something more worthy of their talent.
The plot is... well, it would be passable if not for the world's biggest and most dumbest Ass Pull that it decides to tack on the story in order to set up its climax. As it stands, it's purely and simply insulting to anyone who even remembers anything about the first film. It blatantly contradicts it and makes most of the characters look like complete morons. So yeah, big thumbs down on that.
As for the robot fights... The first movie made an effort to set its fights in interesting locations and to give a real sense of weight to every movement through careful direction and sound design. Most of the fights here happen in boring-looking locations in broad daylight, and the robots don't really have any sense of weight and scale to them: they zip and jump around far too much, and their designs are utterly unimaginative and unremarkable compared to the first movie's. Same goes for the Kaiju. The climax is a big mess.
I give it a 3/10. Only go see it if you absolutely must see giant robots slapping each other in live action. But I bet there'll be a compilation of the fights on Youtube in a few months, so maybe wait for that instead.
Bad as a movie and as a sequel
Let's get straight to the point: I think this movie is trash. Not even good, enjoyable trash: it's boring, plodding, shoddily-acted, clichéd trash.
All the new characters barely have five personality traits between every single one of them: they're universally fairly bland, and only John Boyega manages to coast through the movie on sheer natural charisma alone (seeing him play opposite the charisma vacuum that is Scott Eastwood is interesting in that regard). The returning characters give pretty okay performances, but their presence really drives the new protagonists' blandness home: I wished I was watching a movie solely about them instead. A movie that any of them was enthusiastic about doing, preferably, because I could feel Burn Gorman and Charlie Day wished they were in something more worthy of their talent.
The plot is... well, it would be passable if not for the world's biggest and most dumbest Ass Pull that it decides to tack on the story in order to set up its climax. As it stands, it's purely and simply insulting to anyone who even remembers anything about the first film. It blatantly contradicts it and makes most of the characters look like complete morons. So yeah, big thumbs down on that.
As for the robot fights... The first movie made an effort to set its fights in interesting locations and to give a real sense of weight to every movement through careful direction and sound design. Most of the fights here happen in boring-looking locations in broad daylight, and the robots don't really have any sense of weight and scale to them: they zip and jump around far too much, and their designs are utterly unimaginative and unremarkable compared to the first movie's. Same goes for the Kaiju. The climax is a big mess.
I give it a 3/10. Only go see it if you absolutely must see giant robots slapping each other in live action. But I bet there'll be a compilation of the fights on Youtube in a few months, so maybe wait for that instead.