The franchise has had a lobotomy

Rating: 4/10 (30 March 2019)

Dinosaurs. Amusement Park. Tourists. Disaster.
Jurassic World has them all.
Naturally, I had to see it.
The beginning holds much promise, and it gets your hopes up for the disaster to come. When it does, there are some great action sequences, especially ones with the glass ball containing the soft, chewy child centre.
Unfortunately the final act unravels into outright farce.
Chris Pratt is great as the affable yet bad-ass Raptor Whisperer. He's got an easy going charisma that could easily carry an iconic character like Indiana Jones.
Bryce Dallas Howard plays Claire Dearing, the uptight park manager, who initially clashes with the laid back Owen. Of course you know where the tension goes.
The film tries to flesh out Claire's character by throwing in her two nephews (someone and another kid), who do double duty as McGuffins.
Vincent D'Onofrio shows up as Hoskins, a villainous representative of the military-industrial complex angling to weaponize velociraptors. He's all sneers and scenery chewing, so obviously evil he's got a goatee. D'Onofrio does it well but the evil plan he's been saddled with by the writers makes no sense at all.
The director, Colin Trevorrow, said in interviews that he wanted the dinosaurs to act like real animals, not cartoon monsters. Quelle surprise! I had no idea, as he has well-fed winged dinos (or near enough to dinos) go on a crazed orgy of violence against hapless tourists. Why? Because cool action sequence!
One poor soul is even treated to the most outlandishly elongated death sequence I've ever seen, all to no end. It didn't justify anything, paid nothing back, offered no comeuppance. It was just gleeful indulgence in sadistic torture of a minor character. It was an Itchy & Scratchy moment.
Which brings us to the final act: turn off your brain before it begins.
The first movie proved you could have a smart script and dinosaurs in the same movie. After that, the IQ of the series dropped with each outing. The first one had chaos theory and amber and DNA extraction and cleverness up the whazoo. It was AWESOME.
What does this one have? Hackneyed evil plans, a clunky plot, and characters so smart they run from T-Rex's in high heels.
The franchise has had a lobotomy.