When I was a kid, the one toy I wanted more than any other was a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots set. But Santa wouldn't pony up, and birthdays came and went without a glimpse of those big-ass blue and red robot fighters.

When I finally got the chance to play the game, well... two robots punching each other until one's head pops off can only be entertaining for so long.

Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim resembles Rock 'Em Sock 'Em in more ways than one. First, it's obviously got huge robots beating the crap out of other huge things. And while the IMAX-ready promise of Rim's bigger-than-big smackdowns is irresistibly audacious, in actuality the film delivers your standard brand of summer movie chaos, only the heads that pop off are bigger.

Rim takes place in the near future, after a Whitman's Sampler of massive, city-leveling kaiju (Japanese for "giant monsters") have emerged from a dimensional rift in the floor of the Pacific Ocean and humanity has united to engineer and deploy an army of giant, pilot-controlled robots called jaegers (German: "hunters") to beat them back. (Unfortunately, the pilots are not referred to as "jaegermeisters".)

Eventually the jaeger program is considered as good as dead after the mysterious monsters begin to learn our weaknesses and play against them. An ace jaegermeister team composed of beefcake brothers Raleigh (a fit yet earnest Charlie Hunnam, from Queer as Folk and Sons of Anarchy) and Yancy (Diego Klattenhoff of Homeland) Becket is torn apart, and humankind decides to keep the monsters at bay by building giant walls around the ocean.

This does not go well:

Sure enough, awesomely-named jaeger overlord Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) is soon allowed to get the band back together for one more run at the monster "breach," so he pulls Raleigh out of self-imposed retirement and plugs him back in his jaeger saddle. They endeavor to find him a new copilot - no easy task, as the pilots must be able to achieve a brain merge of sorts in order to share the neural load required of controlling the massive machine - and we trundle toward the inevitable showdown and 11th-hour heroics.

Aside from a setup that's relatively fresh to American audiences (Japanese sci-fi has been working with this kind of formula for decades), the mechanics of Rim may sound rather predictable and rote for a standard big sci-fi action epic. And it kind of is. Fortunately the actors are likeable, the action is colossally big, and Charlie Day is at hand to lend his trademark squirrelly energy to the proceedings as a kaiju-obsessed biologist.

At its best moments, Rim recalls the most successful giant-monster movies (The Host, Cloverfield, Destroy All Monsters); and thankfully, even at its worst, it never recalls the godawful 1998 Godzilla. The monsters are wonderfully nasty, the oversized fight scenes are appropriately bombastic, and the multiculti cast and underlying concept of global unity in the face of an alien enemy are at least something of a comfort in the face of all the devastation.

Charlie Hunnam

The movie's also a technical triumph: the mechanical titans are brilliantly designed and rendered, and some of the fight scenes are bone-crunchingly good. There's also a fantastic robot-free martial arts centerpiece scene, a fitting tribute for a film that lovingly lifts many of its features from Asian film. Plus, the only thing better than Charlie Hunnam in a tank-top is Charlie Hunnam in a tank-top pulling off some seriously badass high kicks.

Rinko Kikuchi

But while del Toro's name is on the film, his fingerprints unfortunately are not. Those of us who love this quirky, deeply emotional filmmaker wouldn't dare to miss one of his gorgeous, deeply moving, and deliciously dark fantasies. But del Toro brings very little of that to work here. Sure, there's a clever flourish here and there, and some of the backstory is more emotionally resonant than in your standard monster movie (particularly the flashbacks of lone female Mako Mori, played as a plucky adult by the always-amazing Rinko Kikuchi from Babel) - but for the most part this is pretty run-of-the-mill action movie stuff.

While del Toro arguably handles the material better than, say, Michael Bay would, the DOA dialog and uninspired plotting might leave you missing the perverse humor of Hellboy and the rapturous dark beauty of Pan's Labyrinth. Is it wrong to have expected more when del Toro has clearly taken care to get as much of the film's immense budget up on the screen? Maybe it is. But I for one am hoping that del Toro has tired of popping the heads off robots and returns to the films that he does best. In the meantime, Pacific Rim is an entertaining yet unexceptional opportunity for him to finally play with the toys he's clearly always wanted.