Failing as a monster movie, a romance and a cautionary tale, this disaster makes the case for letting this franchise go extinct.
Certain scenes in “Jurassic World: Dominion” are reminiscent of 1980s romantic adventure films such as “Romancing the Stone,” as circumstances place two people in a precarious situation as love begins to bubble up between them. At other times, it feels like a “Godzilla” movie, as giant, roaring, teeth-baring, CGI apex predators square off. Once in a while, we’re dropped into a tale of international espionage a la a Bond or Bourne movie, complete with exotic location and colorful locals and danger lurking around every corner, and now it’s time for a chase involving a motorcycle and an airplane! On still other occasions, we get a cautionary tale about a mighty conglomerate that is creating environmental havoc and will stop at nothing, all in the pursuit of global domination and obscene wealth.
“Jurassic World: Dominion” contains elements of all those types of movies and more — and it’s astonishingly inept in every category, as it frantically careens from location to location and genre to genre and we bear witness to the slow and painful death of a once proud and wonderfully crowd-pleasing franchise. This is two hours and 27 minutes of pure dinosaur droppings, and the viewer is as helpless as a boat passing under a bridge on the Chicago River as the Dave Matthews Band unloads a torrent of foul waste from above. Our story picks up in the aftermath of “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” (2018), with the world in a state of semi-chaos now that dinosaurs are roaming freely about the planet, munching on deer and the occasional human and becoming the targets of poachers who catch ’em and sell ’em for big profits. The ethologist and Velociraptor handler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Jurassic World’s former operations manager Claire Dealing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are living off the grid and in the woods with the now 14-year-old Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), who as you might recall is the cloned granddaughter of the late Sir Benjamin Lockwood and is facing an identity crisis even greater than those faced by most teenagers, what with her being a clone and all.
