The trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom tells you the whole plot. The island the dinosaurs are on is about to get blowed up by a volcano, so a rescue operation is launched. Oh, no! The bad guys were lying! Who would have seen that coming? The bad guys are trying to weaponize the dinosaurs! Mayhem ensues.
From the beginning of the opening sequence to the end, the thin storyline is driven primarily by idiocy. One person after another, good guys and bad, make ludicrously horrible decisions. If that weren’t enough, most of the action sequences rely on implausible events that would qualify as slapstick if they were funny. Unfortunately, they’re not.
Fallen Kingdom can’t even maintain any consistency with its own internal rules. In fact, it makes zero attempt to do so. A dinosaur that rips through metal barriers as if they were paper is stopped by a thin wooden door. Dinosaurs have ultra-keen senses of smell when they need to but can’t smell squat if the right person is trying to hide. Tranquilizers are effective, until they’re not, and they repeatedly wear off instantly at precisely the right/wrong moment. Dinosaurs move like lightning, except when they inexplicably pause to menace a potential victim just long enough for someone/something to appear and save the day.
Don’t worry, we’re the good guys. She can’t see, hear, or smell us.
Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) IMDb.com
Which is quite possibly the worst aspect of this whole film. The good guys are saved at the last second with insulting regularity by some person, object, or creature magically materializing out of nowhere. I was absolutely sick of it before the movie was half over, and it only escalated from there. I imagined the following conversation between some random person and the screenwriter:
Random person: Hey, I see you like the “good guys saved at the last second by someone miraculously showing up” trick. Bet you can’t string four of those together in a single sequence.
Screenwriter: Hold my beer!
This might have worked as a comedy or spoof, but the film took itself far too seriously to be funny.
An intact gyrosphere abandoned right where we needed it! What are the odds?
Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pratt, and Justice Smith in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) IMDb.com
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard made valiant attempts at showing some on screen chemistry, and they briefly succeeded in a few scenes. Unfortunately, their personal interactions were overshadowed by all the stupidness going on around them. The bad guys were boring, generic, and flat. Justice Smith as an IT guy and Daniella Pineda as a dinosaur veterinarian were irritating and practically useless sidekicks that I found myself hoping would get eaten almost as soon as they appeared. I won’t spoil things by saying whether either or both survived because that was about the only source of uncertainly in an otherwise predictable, tensionless film.
This movie couldn’t even manage “so bad it’s good” status, and I doubt it would be any better with alcohol. But if your idea of a good time is to watch an endless cascade of cheap jump scares and expensive CGI vomit across the screen while your intelligence is relentlessly insulted for two hours, then Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom might be the movie for you.
Overall rating: 3/10