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Reviews:
Well…
it wasn’t as bad as The Lost World: Jurassic Park
III
by Christian
De Matteo
Wimpy
Ugh. The problem is that even bad sequels sometimes make enough
money their opening weekend to warrant another quick
money hit with another quick sequel.
Such is the exact situation with Jurassic
Park II: The Lost World and this week’s latest
entry into what could have been a great series.
The
only thing that saves JPIII
from the lowest possible rating I could give it, is
that, unlike its predecessor which was an utter
abomination, JPIII
is sometimes so bad it’s funny.
I found myself not scared for one second of
the flick, but laughing hysterically whenever
anything “bad” happened.
I only gave the slightest damn about one
character, Sam Neill’s Alan, and that was mostly
due to residual emotions from Jurassic
Park, which was excellent.
But
instead of learning from what made Jurassic
Park amazing and The
Lost World atrocious, it instead tried to take a
“fun” approach and land somewhere between the
two. Well,
instead of making a careful descend into its goal
territory it instead mimicked the landing of
movie’s plane, crashing horribly close to the most
dangerous spot. Only its sheer and comedic ridiculousness saves it from being
quite as bad as The
Lost World.
The
film begins with an “action” and “plot” set
up sequence that is mildly entertaining more than
anything else, and then launches into a series of
disconnected and unimportant scenes that are
supposed to suffice for plot and character
development. Well,
Mr. Johnson, director of Honey
I Shrunk the Kids, unless you’re going to
follow through, don’t bother.
Either give us the strong structure of the
first film, or just make dinosaurs eat people.
Honestly, after Part 2, you know we only
showed up to see the devouring.
The
director blows 20 minutes on scenes that should
never even have been filmed, and then brings us to
the island (after an absurd dream where a raptor is
speaking to Neill), and proceeds to waste all his
canon fodder characters in ten minutes.
Dammit, man, we know who the big stars are! We
know who
isn’t going to die!
We came to see people get eaten!
Send more doomed characters to at least give
us something to look at.
The
purpose of this movie is to show CGI eating actors!
Lord
knows, we know not to expect more than that!
The
movie then blunders its way through chase scenes and
special effects that are mostly comical, with
several horribly sentimental moments thrown in,
finally meandering its way up to what has to be the
most anticlimactic ending I’ve ever seen in an
“adventure” movie.
Again,
ugh. The
director even had the audacity to give me moments of
hope when the script went back to the first Crichton
novel for scenes they didn’t put in the Jurassic
Park. I
was thrilled to see the chase down the river
sequence, but alas, much like too few of the
characters, the scene was mangled beyond
recognition.
Save
some self-mocking, sequel humor and scripting so bad
I had to laugh, I found myself rooting for the
dinosaurs and, mostly, for the credits.
***SPOILER--DISCUSSING THE LAST SCENE!***
As
our heroes take off— miraculously mostly
unscathed— in the military helicopters, surrounded
by hundreds of soldiers and tons of armament
(perhaps the fastest military deployment in
cinematic history), we watch the infamous pterodons, major scourges of the movie—the
ones that carried off the boy and almost killed
Billy—fly gracefully by, causing no alarm
amongst the characters who merely discuss calmly
where they might be headed now that they are free,
all the while, lovely, celebratory,
“we-survived-an-ordeal-and-everything’s-gonna-be-okay”
music plays triumphantly in the score.
Daf**k?
In other words, child and adult murdering
monsters head for populated areas to kill and maim
and we take a moment to admire them… and not have
the military blow the living hell out of them.
How the hell is that a “happy
ending”?
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