The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
RAPTORS’ DELIGHT
Humans make a mess in ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’
Of all the terrors on view in “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” the sight of Toby Jones’ toupee bobbing up and down, when his character (a sniveling dinosaur auctioneer) dashes into an elevator to alleged safety, with the camera and something called the “Indoraptor” scrambling behind him — reader, it is a strange and wondrous vision of foolish vanity in flight.
There are other diversions in director J.A. Bayona’s Gothic-tinged followup to “Jurassic World.”
That 2015 picture brought the Michael Crichton-derived and Steve Spielberg-bolstered franchise back from extinction. “Jurassic World” went on to become one of the more forgettable blockbusters to cross the $1.5 billion worldwide mark. Chris Pratt had a lot to do with it. He and and Bryce Dallas Howard are back, running, running, making eyes, making the best of their semi-disposable plot machines disguised as characters, and generally lightening a heavy digital effects load.
I like the new “Jurassic World” movie better than the 2015 edition. Bayona’s direction is considerably more stylish and actively mobile than Colin Trevorrow’s was. Much of the climax unfolds inside and outside a brooding, sprawling, 19th-century mansion out of “Rebecca,” complete with basement-level laboratories and holding pens for cloning experiments. In other words, Bayona’s earlier film “The Orphanage” proved extremely helpful for the atmosphere here.
It’s a disarming sight, watching various dinosaurs knocking around the corridors at high speed, or creeping stealthily into a child’s bedroom. The thrills aren’t new-new, exactly, and I suppose you could go all the way to same-old, same-old. I doubt the “Fallen Kingdom” will turn any current hunters (of anything) into animal-rights activists, especially cloned-and-deadlydinosaurs’ rights activists.
But we’re ahead of ourselves. Script by Trevorrow and Derek Connolly goes like so: Back on Isla Nublar, the toothsome meat- and plant-eaters cloned for adventure park fun and profit are threatened with extinction thanks to a newly active volcano. A kindly colleague of the original park’s inventor (played by James Cromwell) wants to bankroll the rescue of the surviving dinosaurs, which he plans to relocate to a sanctuary. But with the master on his deathbed, a weaselly factotum (Rafe Spall) schemes to sell the newly weaponized creatures to the highest international bidder. Boo!
For several good long stretches, Bayona maintains steady, artfully varied suspense and peekaboo games as well as a more interesting batch of supporting characters than these movies usually offer. The junior members of the rescue team are played with eccentric charm by Daniella Peneda (good with needles) and Justice Smith (bad with bugs, and the weather, and
the raptors). Ted Levine oozes heartless self-interest as the security detail head who has other agendas.
Once the action moves to the mainland, it becomes its own kind of haunted-mansion movie. Some may balk at where “Fallen Kingdom” ventures, but the interior sequences work craftily and well. Isabella Sermon takes on the role of intrepid, constantly spying Maisie Lockwood, granddaughter of the Cromwell character. She’s an effective audience identification figure, while maintaining an air of ... something ... spoilerish. (She’s certainly more intriguing than either of the nominal adult leads.)
Is the movie a great time? Well ... with the dinosaurs in a constant sweat, being shot at with bullets and tranquilizer darts and muzzled and subjected to random, nasty tooth extractions, “Fallen Kingdom” leans awfully hard on the animal-abuse pathos. I was more intrigued by the presence of Geraldine Chaplin as the little girl’s protector in the Manderley garb. Chaplin was featured in the finest scene Bayona has yet directed: the eerie sance in “The Orphanage.”
Even if nothing quite measures up in this movie, other than composer Michael Giacchino’s lush yet subtle orchestral colors, Bayona and his writers wanted to give audiences a different kind of monster movie.
That they did.