Well, it finally happened. They made a Jurassic Park movie where the dinosaurs are more interesting than the human characters. That’s perfectly acceptable though. I mean, if you’re going to watch a dinosaur flick just to see dinosaurs stomping and chomping, you might as well care about them as characters.
The script is a little rickety though. It seemed like they wanted to bring back all the old characters from the Jurassic Park saga, but the filmmakers still felt obligated to continue the storyline from the last movie, Jurassic World: Whatever the Hell They Called That One, so they just sort of split the difference. That flick at least ended on a tantalizing note: Dinosaurs cohabitating with humans. This one kind of wraps up that storyline with a lame internet news video about the aftermath of the last one before doing its own thing. Since “its own thing” features scenes of cowboys lassoing dinosaurs (which has major Valley of Gwangi vibes), raptors teaching their babies to hunt, and an underground dinosaur fight club, I can’t be overly critical about it.
The scenes between Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are rather meh. Pratt in particular just seems to be going through the motions, as he displays little of the spark and charm that he brought to the previous movies. It’s hard to entirely blame him though since the screenplay gave him next to nothing to do.
The stuff with the O.G. J.P. crew work slightly better. The “getting the band back together” scenes between Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum are kind of fun, but it often seems like it came out of a completely different movie. It’s almost as if they duct-taped two scripts together in an effort to appease the old school Jurassic Park fans and the newfangled Jurassic World fans. That wouldn’t have been so bad if the film didn’t wait until the last twenty minutes to bring the new and old characters together. Even then, it might’ve been forgivable had the script given the two crews any memorable interactions. Like most of these legacy sequels, it just kind of reeks of missed opportunities.
Human drama was never the series’ strong suit, so it’s sort of easy to write off a lot of the screenplay’s shortcomings. Individual action sequences work as fun, mindless popcorn fodder, and the film is more entertaining than not. Scenes of characters evading dinosaurs on a cracking frozen lake and parachuting into a swarm of flying dinosaurs pack a punch. Ultimately, these moments feel more like levels in a video game than a movie. It’s never dull; I’ll give it that. It just feels a bit half-baked and forgettable.
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