A lack of bite
JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION Cert 12A ★★ In cinemas now
With Top Gun: Maverick flying high in the box office, here’s another nostalgia-soaked legacy sequel. Nearly 30 years after Sam Neill’s Dr Alan Grant, Laura Dern’s Dr Ellie Sattler, and Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm survived Jurassic Park, the gang are back together.
“You look the same,” says Dr Ellie to Dr Alan as she catches up with her old love interest. She has a point. Neill is now 74 but so well preserved you wonder if he’s spent the last three decades in a bubble of amber.
Soon, they will be joined by a lithe and luxuriantly bouffanted Jeff Goldblum who
at 69 can still convincingly fight off a T-Rex with a flaming torch.
Sadly, time hasn’t been kind to the dinosaurs. Movies have moved on since Spielberg wowed us in 1993, and the middling CGI with retro animatronic effects fails to summon the requisite oohs and aahs.
The flabby plot is an even bigger problem. Biosyn, a not-at-all-sinister-sounding biotech firm, has won a contract to capture the escaped dinos and plonk them in a sort of research theme park (will they ever learn?) in the Dolomite Mountains.
When a plague of cat-sized locusts rampages across America, the three doctors team up to expose dodgy goings-on at Biosyn.
Meanwhile, the stars of the previous two instalments, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), have been raising cloned 14-year-old Maisie (Isabella Sermon) in a secluded log cabin. When the teen is kidnapped, Claire and Owen trace her abduction to Biosyn and team up with Han Solo-esque pilot and smuggler Kayla (DeWanda Wise) to break into their HQ.
Goldblum ad-libs amusing lines and the action scenes move at a fair clip. But instead of a roar, this franchise ends with barely a whimper.
The action moves at a clip but, instead of a roar, this franchise ends with a whimper