
When Laura Dern and Sam Neil craned their necks to behold a wandering pack of brontosauruses in the original Jurassic Park 25 years ago, the music swelled, the emotions bubbled and audiences were filled with a deep sense of awe. When Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard run afoul of whatever dinosaurs happen their way in the franchise's newest entry, it is painfully obvious that this series needs to go extinct.
Welcome to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, a tired and way-too-long slog from JA Bayona, director of the excellent 2007 horror film The Orphanage. This bad boy doesn't even register on the dumb summer popcorn flick scale thanks to its retreading of old material disguised as homage, parallel utter lack of acting and story quality, and heavy-handed performances from everyone throughout.
When last we left our heroes, they'd escaped yet another dino theme park gone awry and now, just like in the third Jurassic Park (that's the one where Sam Neil goes back to the island for some reason), they must return on some misguided animal rights mission because—get this—turns out there was a volcano there the whole time and it's active suddenly and nobody wants the dinos to die. Again. Oof.
But it turns out the guys behind the mercy mission are animal traffickers hired by yet another generation of ne'er-do-wells (plus BD Wong, again, for who-knows-why) who plan on getting rich through dino-cloning and genetic manipulation; people start getting eaten and our heroes must intervene or, like, more people gonna get eaten.
Pratt seems bored here as an animal behaviorist (yeah, right) and is not even allowed to do that rogue-ish smarm-charm for which he's become known in better movies like Guardians of the Galaxy. Howard, meanwhile, brings no heat whatsoever to the role of a former exec now laboring under a nonprofit change of heart and trying to save animals because life is sacred or something. Other cast members exist, it's just they matter so little that one almost wonders why they appear in the first place. Comic relief? Depth? If so, you'd never know it, and the script certainly isn't doing them any favors, nor are the endless chase scenes, perilous moments of dino terror or beyond-silly narrative.
With news of any Star Wars spinoffs biting the dust this week due to low box office numbers, we can only hope moviegoers enact a similar takedown of the Jurassic movies. Steven Spielberg captured something special with his first adaptation of the Michel Crichton universe all those years ago. Today's attempts feel stale and business-like, the sort of product churned out to take advantage of nostalgia and a slap in the face of everyone who ever felt a sense of wonder for the idea of prehistoric beasts. Boo. Muck. Filth. Slime. Rubbish. Boo.
3
+Dinos are objectively awesome
-Just a straight-up bad movie
Jurrasic World: Fallen Kingdom
Directed by Bayona
With Pratt and Howard
Violet Crown, Regal, PG-13, 128 min.
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