By the time we get to the last scenes — in what is clearly setting up for another generation of movies — we’re stroking our chin and furrowing our brow so hard you’d think we’d just watched Blue Planet 3
NOT many successful film franchises make it to their fifth release without a complete reinvention along the way.
Jurassic had that three years ago with the introduction of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s world — one where we could look back at Spielberg’s original and think, “If only that were . . . bigger and unnecessarily complicated.”
Wait, you weren’t? Oh.
Here, with the second in the “World” era, they are asking a lot of the audience.
All we really want is a relatively original film about dinosaurs with some good CGI and decent scares but this suffers from a serious case of “kitchen sink”.
We are three years post-Jurassic World, Isla Nublar is derelict and the animals are roaming free. The island is now volcanic and there is a growing movement from animal rights campaigners (including Dallas Howard’s Claire) to save them from a second extinction.
Luckily John Hammond’s billionaire partner, Benjamin Lockwood, decides to step in and place them on — lo and behold! — another island.
Who’s Benjamin Lockwood? Oh, you know . . . the original partner of Ingen (the original dino makers) who HAS NEVER BEEN MENTIONED BEFORE.
This is not the only slight irritation in the story, by the way — there’s a doozy coming up. Anyway, I digress. The only problem is, they can’t track Blue the raptor, because she’s far too clever.
Luckily they know a man who can.
Thanks to the devious Eli (Rafe Spall) and Wheaton (Toby Jones) and a rather ham-fisted premise, things go awry, continually. This is another of the film’s problems. One huge disaster is averted and immediately replaced by another, then another.
By the time we get to the last scenes (in what is clearly setting up for another generation of movies) we’re stroking our chin and furrowing our brow so hard you’d think we’d just watched Blue Planet 3. I don’t want Attenborough, I want a T-Rex eating a man, please.
There are many glimpses of greatness — a genuinely scary underwater prologue, an exciting gyroscope chase and a too-close-for-comfort T-Rex encounter all harked back to past glories — but all this pales into insignificance against one particular gripe I have.
Something is revealed that has such far-reaching implications for the human race that if the film had any sense of itself, it would have had characters stopping dead in their tracks and fainting at the sheer brevity of the situation.
Not only is it never mentioned again by anyone, the revelation itself is met with nothing more than a slight gasp.
Utterly ludicrous.
A fun enough couple of hours but sadly, unless it just plays for fun next time, this series is now in the same kind of danger as its stars.
JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM, 128mins (12A)
★★★☆☆
