The weakest of the three but still a decent ride

Rating: 5/10 (23 November 2006)

The Lost World: Jurassic Park has come in for a fair bit of flak over the years from critics, most of whom see it as little more than a shallow re-tread of the original but with more plot holes and less of the charisma. This is true to an extent, but that isn't to say it's a bad film. Approached in the right frame of mind it can make for a great night in, especially if you have a massive television accompanied by surround sound speakers to help you get lost in the thundering carnage, you just have to make sure you switch off those departments in your brain labelled "cohesion" and "reason" beforehand.
Set several years after the original, it sees park creator John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) coercing the now ruined Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to take another trip to an island filled with monstrous prehistoric reptiles that all want to eat him. This isn't the same island as the first though, this is 'Site B,' sort of a nature reserve to the original's theme park where the dinosaurs roam free with no fences to hold them in and are allowed to thrive in their own right. Malcolm and a small team comprised of zoologists, photographers and Vince Vaughn soon find things going awry when a large group of evil capitalists with no respect for the natural order of the island arrive tooled up to the shoulders with all kinds of expensive weaponry with the intention of capturing enough dinosaurs to start a new park. And faster than you can say "this takes a few liberties with Velociraptor design" all involved find themselves turning into a delightful buffet for the local dinos.
If Jurassic Park was an adventure story and Jurassic Park 3 was a rather fun B-movie, The Lost World is the action hero of the series. Hardly any time is wasted before we see the dinosaurs and shortly after, all sorts of chaos is being unleashed. The highlight of this is an attack by two T Rexes on a trailer which is easily the equal to the first film's Rex assault, it's just a shame that the rest of the film doesn't quite match up.
Sure, the dinosaur's pursuit of the human teams through the jungle is all very exciting, but there's little of the careful increase in tension that the first film did so well bar the aforementioned trailer scene. It's simply a case of "show dinosaur, people die" repeated several times over and on closer inspection, is nearly a complete re-tread of 'Aliens,' with the raptors standing in for the aliens and the Rex standing in for the Queen. The ending is even very similar, with the Rex being brought back to an urban metropolis for a final showdown, just as the alien queen was brought back to the Solaco.
That said, it's still an enjoyable romp. The plot holes are too numerous to count but nonetheless, it's still easy to get caught up in the quick pace. It also has a top notch cast to back it up; Jeff Goldblum is just as watchable as he ever was, Vince Vaughn dispels with the funny guy routine and instead goes on a testosterone overload as a macho environmentalist and Pete Postlethwaite even puts in an appearance as a great white hunter (his line upon first encountering Vaughn incidentally is worth the price of entry alone). It may tread an uneasy line between the ridiculous and the entertaining, but it isn't half as bad as it's sometimes made out to be.