'Pacific Rim': Like playing with Transformers in the tub

WHEN WE LAST looked in on Guillermo del Toro, he was writing "The Hobbit," a gigantic movie about dwarves.

How big might del Toro go to make a movie about giants?

Pretty freaking big, as we see in the long and thunderously loud "Pacific Rim," a sci-fi actioner about near-future earthmen building mega-battlebots to repel an invasion by seaborne aliens.

The alien creatures are called Kaiju, our bots are called Jaegers, and the plot centers on a Jaeger pilot named Raleigh (Charlie Hunnam), the tops in his trade - the Jaegermaestro, if you will.

Cut from "Top Gun" cloth, he's a talented ace with anxiety issues - reclaimed from the psychic scrap heap by the robot army general (Idris Elba) to lead a desperate Jaeger assault on the encroaching monsters and the portal that allows them access to Earth.

"Pacific Rim" has been hailed as a "Star Wars" for a new generation, and that seems a bit generous. Better to think of it as "Godzilla Vs. RoboCop"- not a bad thing in itself, if you are a 10-year-old boy with earplugs (see this movie in Imax 3D if you want to feel as though a monster is stomping on your head).

"Star Wars" assembled myth and westerns and hot rod movies into something new and visionary - the earthbound "Pacific Rim" feels more like something borrowed, and wears its borrowing ("Transformers," "Reel Steel," mixed martial arts, a dash of "Starship Troopers,") more obviously.

And its commercialism. The Kaiju may be a nod to Toho studios, Jaegers to the power of German engineering (I kept looking for the Mercedes logo), but the names also transparently beckon to the crucial Asian and European movie markets.

Del Toro knits this globalism into the story - Raleigh hooks up with a Japanese co-pilot, and works with Aussie, Chinese and Russian teams for the last ditch assault on the monsters. Somewhere in there is the movie's theme - technology as a way of amplifying human cooperation in the face of an existential threat.

Del Toro, Oscar-rewarded for "Pan's Labyrinth," is a canny designer/director of beasts ("Hellboy") and objects ("Cronos") - as such, I was disappointed in the familiar look of his robots and his sea creatures, exhausted after awhile by their clomping fights.

And thus more than ready for the comic relief provided by Charlie Day as the eccentric researcher who dissects the monsters looking for clues to their motives, and Ron Perlman as the black marketer who traffics in monster remains.

The movie could have used more of Perlman's funny deadpan cool. And a bit more of his wit.

If I'm making a movie about rock 'em sock 'em robots called Jaegers, I'm going to have my hero throw a jab and a cross and say "how about two shots of Jaeger, bitch."

Perhaps, in this future, all supplies of Jaeger have been depleted. Maybe that's why the Earth looks like it has such a bad hangover.

By the way, dad, if you've got a flask, and you're babysitting through this, you know what to do.

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