It's a dumb movie, but enjoyable nonetheless.

Rating: 6/10 (20 June 2015)

You'd think that after the first park went so badly that corporations would never try to mutate dinosaurs again. But we humans never seem to learn, as 22 years later and we've got a brand new park even bigger with new deadly attractions bound to cause more chaos.
We spend the first 20 minutes of the film seeing the park itself. It's more modern than the tribal feel of the first park, instead going for something more like Universal Park being a fully fledged tourist attraction with modern high tech designs with things like holograms to boot. But despite the park being a success with 20,000 visitors daily, apparently it's still not enough and they need to make a new attraction to lure in new audiences. So they've had the scientists create a new dinosaur that's even bigger and more dangerous called the Indominus Rex. What could possibly go wrong?
But then everything goes wrong. The Indominus Rex escapes and begins to hunt for sport, killing every dinosaur and person that it comes against. We see the new dinosaur hunt its prey in interesting ways blending into environments, clawing at thick skinned enemies or armour to find weak points and just charging dead on with brute force to chomp its enemies to bits. On top of the terror of this new dinosaur we also get plenty of cool scenes with trained velociraptors, who despite being trained like circus lions still always pose a threat to the human characters who risk being turned on at any moment. Their uncertain allegiance does lead to some pretty tense stare offs.
Whilst the dinosaurs are great, the human characters are far less enjoyable. Most of the characters in the film are either idiots or just plain annoying. Just like the first Jurassic Park we get two new kids here that are visiting the park and who seem to do nothing but get in to trouble and become damsels in distress despite this being a family film and obviously never being in real peril. There's an underutilised Vincent D'Onfrio as a military type who wants to use the dinosaurs for hunting who doesn't seem to have much purpose in the film other than rubbing in the Jurassic Park message that corporations are bad. And Irrfan Khan as the park owner, who comes across as a more annoying, douchey version of Richard Branson.
The only good characters are the leads Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard). They're both the basic archetypes you'd expect in a blockbuster film playing the Pratt playing the typical quick witted action hero and Howard playing the park manager who goes from a busy bureaucrat to being a caring bad-ass. But they play the archetypes well by remaining likable and getting a fair number of laughs over the course of the film.
At times the film does come off as being self contradictory in some of its messages. For example at one point in the film a character jokes about selling out to corporations and that they may as well just name one of the dinosaurs after them. But then the film sells itself out to corporations by naming several products they could name it and filling the film with many product placements from Starbucks to Mercedes. Then there's the way that they mock some blockbuster clichés like the woman ripping her dress up to become a bad-ass, but then indulges in others like the typical stereotypes.
Other than one fight scene (which I won't spoil here) none of the fight scenes ever reach anything close to the likes of the iconic T- Rex scene in the first Jurassic Park. At times the action can even begin to feel a little dull or repetitive. And if you think about it too much then you'll be bound to find many plot holes. But there's still enough here to put it ahead of the previous Jurassic Park sequels and is still an enjoyable turn your brain off b-movie blockbuster.