Lisa Johnson Mandell’s Jurassic World: Dominion review says if you love snarly dinosaurs but don’t care about plot, character or nuance, this film is for you.

I’m surprised, and puzzled by Jurassic World: Dominion. How do you take an iconic franchise, a game cast and almost limitless resources, and come up with such a dull, silly, lazy film?

Ask director Colin Trevorrow, who is also responsible for the last two Jurassic World films. He seems to have mastered the art of sending a franchise into extinction. We’ve been promised it this will be the last, but doors are conveniently left open, as always, depending on box office returns.

And they’re bound to be excellent, by post pandemic, pre-Top Gun: Maverick standards. Now that people remember just how fun going to the movies can be, they’re not allowing a little thing like poor quality stop them. And I’m not saying they should.

This time around, we find the beloved characters from the Jurassic Park editions (played by Sam Neill, Laura Dern, BD Wong, Jeff Goldbloom and a few others) being brought in to mug with the newer heroes, including Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt, the dinosaur whisperer who never misses an opportunity to extend his arm towards them and peer intently into their eyes.

The plot is full of holes big enough for a brontosaurus to breezily breech, but basically involves dinosaurs escaping and threatening civilians on city streets,  so an organization emerges to control their evolution and make sure they’re treated humanely. But of course that industrial entity is motivated by corporate greed.

That company is run by a megalomaniac played by Campbell Scott who, for some reason, has been made up to look exactly like Apple’s Tim Cook. It’s very distracting, and not that cute.

Of course it’s up to the heroes past and present to come together and save the world from the dinos and the dinos from the world.

But it’s mostly about the money shots.

With lots of big dino teeth snapping and people looking up in wide-eyed fear and wonder, mouths agape, we get the same old scenes we’ve seen before.

And those perfectly placed group shots? Unforgivable, but you can bet you’ll see them relived ad nauseam on TikTok.

More of a farce than an adventure drama, it does have its moments—but they’re mostly of laughter at the incongruity of it all.

In the end, kids will love it, adults will hate it, and it will sell a lot of popcorn. Unlike Tyrannosaurus rex, it means well.

Rated PG-13

2 Hours 27 Minutes

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