8 Good Films One Crippling Flaw Away From Being Awesome
2. Pacific Rim
The Flaw: The Human Cast, And Their Accents SMASH! A Jaegar hits a Kaiju in the mouth amidst the giant swells of the Pacific. The gigantic robot looks awesome, the monster looks formidable and the action is as captivating as it is spectacular. As Ramin Djawadi's earth shuddering score kicks in my inner ten year-old is doing somersaults. This film is going to be all sorts of awesome... and then one of the cast opens their mouth. Suddenly, the battle for humanity is lost and the war on acting has begun. Obviously disregarding the titan of acting that is Idris 'Big Dris' Elba, I am hard pressed to remember a film that was so clearly destined for greatness being let down so completely by mechanical acting and an amazing array of appalling accents. Charlie Hunnam - who has done some good work in Sons of Anarchy, delivers his - admittedly clunky - dialogue like a news anchor reading from a teleprompter. His accent also veers from American to English and back again, which begs the question, were there no American actors available? The chemistry between Hunnam's Raleigh Becket and Mako Kikuchi's Mako is non-existent and scenes in which their character's unspoken love 'develops' are more painful than a rocket-powered punch to the pecans. Then Sean Slater (Robert Kazinksy) from British soap opera Eastenders turns up wearing a bomber jacket and speaking in an 'Australian' accent. Really Guillermo? Cockney 'badboy' Sean Slater is Australian? What's next? Eastenders' Phil and Grant Mitchell making an appearance as a couple of 'French' brothers in their undefeated Jaegar 'Le Peggy Peril'?! Perhaps we will have to wait for Atlantic Rim for that little treat. It may be argued that in a film in which 300ft robots beat seven bells out of building-sized monsters the acting becomes slightly irrelevant. However if you don't believe in the characters, care about their story or their fate the action, however incredible, carries less emotional weight and the films storyline suffers as a result. So close.
