'Pacific Rim' sequel fails to rise

A new group battles to save the Earth, but this sequel offers little reason to cheer.

In the summer of 2013, director Guillermo del Toro scored at the box office with Pacific Rim, a movie that introduced audiences to Jaegers, gigantic robot-like creations that stomped through the nation's multiplexes. Jaegers were deployed against the Kaiju. In case you need reminding, the Kaiju were genetically engineered amphibious monsters that arrived on Earth through a portal in the Pacific Ocean — or something like that.

What proved winning about Pacific Rim had less to do with plot or even with its high-stakes battles than with the sheer scale at which Del Toro allowed his imagination to take over the screen.

As just about everyone knows by now, del Toro reigned in the scope of his imagination to make The Shape of Water, a smaller movie but a wise career choice. The Shape of Water won a best-picture Oscar and Del Toro took home the Oscar for best director.

Now comes Pacific Rim Uprising, the inevitable sequel to the first installment. Del Toro remains as one of the film’s gaggle of producers (14 in all) but directing chores have been taken over by Steven S. DeKnight, whose previous directing experience mostly involves TV work.

In DeKnight’s hands, the franchise becomes little more than a collection of cacophonous battle sequences that already have evoked apt comparisons with the Transformer movies. A preview audience seemed to include more kids than I expected. It's possible that 12-year-olds will be Uprising's bread and butter.

A short reaction: Enormous Jaegers guided by pilots who operate inside the robots' heads, giant sea monsters that make a late-picture appearance and a cast that’s subordinated to a flood of effects mark a movie that stomps hard but can't shake loose from the deadening bonds of repetition.

That's not to say that the cast doesn’t work hard. John Boyega, familiar from the latest round of Star Wars movies, appears as Jake Pentecost, the son of the Idris Elba character from the first edition. A renegade from the Pan Pacific Defense Corps that a decade ago fought the Kaiju, Jake makes his living salvaging parts from Jaegers that were discarded after the war that shook the first movie.

Jake is joined by a sidekick, Amara (Cailee Spaeny), an orphaned teenager who has built her own Jaeger and who is recruited to train as a Defense Corps pilot. Naturally, Jake is coaxed back into the Defense Corps where he engages in manly banter with his former co-pilot (Scott Eastwood) as they fulfill their assignment, training a new generation of Jaeger pilots.

Never mind the Chinese corporation that wants to create automated Jaegers that don't need pilots.

Spaeny conveys the required spunk. Boyega projects plenty of gruff magnetism. But there's more smash-and-crash than acting as the movie moves toward a climax in which a crew of teenage Defense Corps recruits must save the world, a task that can’t be accomplished without destroying large parts of Tokyo.

It's possible that Pacific Rim will click with audiences impatient for an early helping of summer, and, of course, it's set up for another sequel. Maybe Boyega and company can find a more engagingly novel third helping.

This week's mega-helping of vulgar fun

Another movie for fans of rude/crude humor.

If you've been hankering to watch Jennifer Aniston play dirty dentist, the new comedy Horrible Bosses is eager to oblige. So is Aniston, who turns out to be good at flaunting her character's maniacal libido.

Working overtime to turn out more of the rude/crude humor that has become a Hollywood staple, Horrible Bosses follows the antics of three bumbling employees who vow to kill their abusive bosses, one of them played by Aniston.

Heavier on raunch than wit, Horrible Bosses begins when our hapless heroes (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis) decide their sanity depends on getting rid of the aggressively vile people for whom they work.

It's difficult to watch Horrible Bosses without thinking that the filmmakers are looking for increasingly outrageous ways to walk through the door thrown open by raunch masters such as Judd Apatow (The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and Todd Phillips (the Hangover movies).

As was the case with those movies, fans of purposefully tasteless humor should find laughs in a movie about downtrodden employees who know nothing about murder, which means they probably don't watch enough TV.

Not surprisingly, the movie's extremely horrible bosses serve up an exaggerated variety behavior that in real life would result in more lawsuits than laughter.

In a role that amounts to a cliche for him, Kevin Spacey plays the sadistic head of the financial company where Bateman's character works. He teases Bateman's Nick with promises of a promotion. He forces him to drink a glass of 18-year-old Scotch at 8:15 in the morning, and then accuses him of having a drinking problem. He's a humiliation specialist.

Colin Farrell -- whose main job here seems to involve not looking like himself -- portrays the odious Bobby Pellitt, the cocaine-snorting son of the kindly owner of a chemical company (Donald Sutherland). Sutherland's character dies within the first 15 minutes, leaving the company to his hateful son.

Taking a break from mediocre romantic comedies, Aniston portrays a sex-crazed dentist who insists that her assistant (Day) sleep with her. It's an impolite, turn-the-tables role in which a woman sexually harasses her male employee.

An underutilized and funny Jamie Foxx plays an ex-convict, a guy our trio of bumblers seeks out in a divey bar. For $5,000, Foxx's character -- whose name can't be printed here -- becomes what he calls "a murder consultant."

His idea: To avoid establishing any motives, the boys should kill one another's bosses, a plan that evokes references to (and jokes about) Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.

Horrible Bosses does little more than look for ways to keep the jokestream flowing. Nothing wrong with that, but a joke about spilled cocaine? Really?

When it comes to comedy, especially vulgar ones, I feel duty-bound to distinguish the audience reaction from my own. I'd say that the preview audience with which I saw the movie found it funnier than I did. Me? The thing that made me chuckle the most -- aside from Foxx -- was one of the lines Sudeikis, as the over-sexed male in the group, delivers during the obligatory outtakes.

During the movie, Bateman and Sudeikis do a decent job of carrying the banter load with Day working at the more exasperated end of the spectrum. It also should be pointed out that for all its vulgarity,Horrible Bosses isn't nearly as corrosive as Hangover 2.

Once you adjust to director Seth Gordon's comic style, you can see many of the jokes coming. Some will make you yuk. Others will make you duck. How you respond to this ribald helping of humor probably depends on whether you're doing more of the former than the latter.