Dismal sequel

Rating: 2/10 (19 August 2007)

This film has a cast of established actors, a renowned director at the helm and a continuance of the very believable CGI that was on display in the first film. Why then does it largely fail, and why is it so inferior to its predecessor? The answer lies in the script and its structure. After twenty minutes of set-up, most of the film involves various characters running around an island pursued by dinosaurs. We've seen this already in the first film, and the rehash here is done without spirit or wit, rendering it dull and mundane. What the paying public ought to have been clamoring for, and been shown much more of, is the paltry twenty minutes at the end featuring a T-Rex running amok in San Diego. It is extremely baffling why a movie that talks so much about the perils of man interacting with dinosaurs shows so little of that interaction in the urban setting of a big city, and even then with only one of the dinosaurs. In fact, for a blockbuster action movie  and a second go-round at that  it is bordering on criminal that they waste the viewers' time with so many ho-hum by-the-numbers sequences on the island.
A key failure in this long middle passage of the film is that, besides the always-dependable Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, the principals are playing a number of underdeveloped characters that are hard to work up any real sympathy for. Julianne Moore turns in a poor, unbelievable performance as Malcolm's roving-scientist love interest. Vince Vaughn is miscast as a hired-hand photographer, but does not have much to work with. Postlethwaite stays the right side of over-the-top as a hired hunter, but for the most part the film shows that names and money alone do not make for a successful film.
If the feeble script deserves any kind of credit, it would be for giving us a sense of empathy with the creatures, but to be truly invested in a movie, we also need to empathize with the characters, and have genuinely interesting things happen to them. For a blockbuster, it also helps to have a whiz-bang ending. This film has a hugely anti-climatic one, but the biggest transgression of all is its failure to entertain.