Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

I’ll go ahead and say it: this Jurassic World reboot/spin-off is pretty bad. 

Okay, the first one wasn’t quite so awful, but it was underwhelming as could be as the successor to one of the biggest movies of all time. But at least that movie was passable as a mindless, loud summer diversion. Fallen Kingdom fails even at that. This one is just bad, from start to finish. If this is the best that one of the once-premier blockbuster franchises could crank out, “Fallen Kingdom” would be more apt as a descriptor for the state of the series.

Three years after disaster befell the eponymous theme park, the now-abandoned resort island is suddenly volcanic, a prospect which would mean the end of the poor dinosaurs. As the world debates the merits of saving the dinos, the park’s former manager (Bryce Dallas Howard) and trainer (Chris Pratt) are recruited to rescue them by a seemingly-benevolent organization. Predictably, it turns out said organization is less interested in saving them than in making money off of them.

The trailers looked to be promising some spectacular dinosaur chases on an exploding island, a terrific summer B-movie template if there ever was one. Instead, we get roughly ten minutes on the island, and a whole lot of mediocre dark house action inside the mansion of a kindly billionaire (James Cromwell doing his best Richard Attenborough impression), who somehow missed the evil corporate bastards building a major dino holding pen in his basement.

In between that, there’s lots and lots of filler. And not fun filler. It’s painfully boring, as none of the banter between Pratt and company is amusing, and none of the villains (Rafe Spall as the typical greedy corporate bastard, Ted Levine as the typical one-note grunt, and Toby Jones doing his typical slimy villain thing) are interesting. And Jeff Goldblum…sadly, the trailers misled there, too, for he only has snippets of screen time. So much time is instead devoted to spewing exposition for more sequels but gives little reason to even stick around for this one, let alone come back for more.

But, little of this matters, really, as long as the dinosaurs are cool, right? Well, it’s a negative on that front, too. What sense of wonder and awe and terror there was in the franchise 25 years ago is completely gone. There’s not a single impressive visual that wows the viewer, no tension to any of the chases. Furthermore, not only are the new creatures total disappointments (and unlike the Indominus rex last time, didn’t even need to be spoiled by the marketing to underwhelm), but the film even reduces the series’ iconic dinos to cute and cuddly. It just feels wrong, like if H.R. Giger's Alien or Michael Myers suddenly became kid-friendly.

Simply put, this is the worst of the Jurassic Park movies by far, and keep in mind one of them involved the cast digging through dinosaur dung to find a (sill-ringing) cell phone. That was only a single scene, at least, whereas Fallen Kingdom is a two-plus-hour dino turd.