Jurassic World: Dominion
Dir: Colin Trevorrow
Cert: 12A
OUT FRIDAY
★★☆☆☆
After a rather disappointing second outing in 2018, the third and final instalment in the Jurassic World franchise sees the return of director Colin Trevorrow in what is being touted as the last film in this current trilogy. Meanwhile original Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) cast members Laura Dern, Sam Neil and Jeff Goldblum provide the nostalgia and most of the laughs in Jurassic World: Dominion which had its premiere in LA earlier this week.
Four years after the destruction of Isla Nublar In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, dinosaurs now live alongside humans in semi harmony. Meanwhile as a black market for prehistoric creatures emerges, governments around the world decide to entrust dodgy corporate outfit Biosyn and its boss (played rather brilliantly by Campbell Scott) with the containment of the many species of dangerous creatures roaming the world freely.
Things get further complicated when teenage clone Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) whose DNA could hold the key to Biosyn’s new nefarious venture, is captured by a group of mercenaries. This leads former Jurassic World employees Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) to go looking for their young charge. Meanwhile Dr Ellie Sadler (Dern), Professor Ian Malcom (Goldblum) and Archeologist Alan Grant (Neil) are once again reunited as they investigate giant swarms of locusts that could be linked to Biosyn.
Hoping to end the trilogy with a bang, Treverrow and co-writers Emily Carmichael and Derek Connolly have decided to throw everything but the kitchen sink at this third and final film. Sadly for those involved, none of it actually works and in the end we are left with a deeply muddled, overlong and preposterously themed story which isn’t a patch on the first film.
Quite aside from it being just too long and too incoherent, Dominion also manages to be very boring. Granted, having Dern, Neil and Goldblum in the mix again is somewhat of a coup for this ailing franchise, but nothing, not even Goldblum’s infamous scenery chewing style of acting could save this from being one of the worst films in the series.
Dominion’s saving grace often comes in the shape of a peerless performance courtesy of rising star Mamoudou Athie - seen recently in the excellent Netflix series Archive 81 - who plays shady Biosyn boss Lewis Dodgson’s right hand man Ramsay Cole. Elsewhere, DeWanda Wise delivers the action and the laughs as mercenary cargo plane pilot Kayla Watts, while original cast member BD Wong also makes an appearance as remorseful Biosyn scientist Dr. Henry Wu.
Overall, and bar a few good performances, Dominion fails on almost all accounts by delivering a story that is too preposterous even for a franchise that has demanded that we suspend disbelief for the last 3 decades. Not the fitting end one would have expected.
