It started out great. The opening scene in the nuclear power plant was very captivating and as you mentioned Bryan Cranston gives a great performance. The film is still engaging up until the scene where the other MUTO escapes. At this point Bryan Cranston dies and Aaron Taylor Johnston is left to carry the film as the lead. Unfortunately, he's simply not as interesting as a character and doesn't have the same on-screen presence.
Things begin to unravel more at this point. Ken Watanabe seems to retreat into himself and adopts a permanently perplexed and shocked expression throughout. He also seems to lose the ability to properly speak and convey himself, coming out with vague statements about the natural order of things, while they have a crisis on their hands. His colleague, Sally Hawkins, gives a really poor and awkward performance, to the point that there were actually a few laughs in the cinema at one of her scenes. As a character shes entirely redundant, and I've no idea how casting somehow let her slip through the cracks.
Then there's the wife and child background story that tries to get us to be emotionally involved in their struggle. Lots of scenes of her running around, taking calls, and just generally worrying. It's all just uninteresting, and very boring.
The structure of the movie itself, just seems to be a list of boxes to tick, of points progressing the plot along from large set piece to large set piece. It labors, because it's all so unnatural.
Finally we have the actual fighting between the two MUTO's. which is great. Lots of Special effects, lots of buildings destroyed, just good solid popcorn entertainment. The problem is, you don't really want the action to end, because then we have to revisit the humans lives we really don't care about.
The film has glaring problems and I was very disappointed in it. I'd give it a 6/10.
