It’s A JURASSIC, JURASSIC, JURASSIC, JURASSIC WORLD

Now playing at a monster-sized multiplex near you:

JURASSIC WORLD (Dir. Colin Trevorrow, 2015)

There are only two plot points in every JURASSIC PARK movie. They are as follows: #1. There are dinosaurs – that’s amazing! #2. We must now get the Hell away from them.

It’s been 22 years since the highly praised first film in the franchise which was based on the 1990 Michael Crichton bestseller, and 14 years since the heavily maligned third entry, but those same elements are strongly intact in this fourth installment.

They just added some new faces on top of the premise that we’re now dealing with a fully functioning theme park, and a new hybrid dinosaur designed to wow the kids because, as park operations manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) puts it: “Let’s face it, no one’s impressed by a dinosaur anymore.”

This “new” adventure concerns Claire’s nephews (Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins) coming to visit Jurassic World at the same time that the ginormous hybrid breaks free and, you know, starts killing people and other dinosaurs.

The idea to create this highly intelligent, extremely dangerous animal dubbed the Indominus rex for the purposes of marketing a new attraction is criticized by the park’s buff raptor wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), who leaves all his lovable Chris Pratt-isms (see Parks and Recreation, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY) behind to play a generic bad ass hero character complete with lame wise-cracks.

Meanwhile, the villain this time is the head of the park’s private security force portrayed by Vincent D’Onofrio, who wants to use the dinosaurs for military purposes. The moment he starts spouting out his evil disrespectful to nature rhetoric, we know we’re gonna see him getting eaten later.

There’s also the useless mystery of what dinosaurs the Indominus rex is a hybrid of. We are told that its base is a T-rex, but the rest is classified, so throughout the movie Pratt is trying to together that puzzle.

But, of course, nobody cares about that flimsy connective tissue. What people are coming for is the mayhem with dinosaurs attacking tourists, kids narrowly escaping grisly deaths, and lots of CGI-ed spectacle, and it’s all here in set piece after set piece.

There are lots of call backs to the Steven Spielberg-directed original too, including an appearance by the old, crumbling Jurassic Park’s visitor’s center (complete with the same old jeep), holograms of the most memorable creatures such as the Dilophosaurus in the new fanged visitor’s center, and B.D. Wong, the only returning cast member from the first film, as Dr. Henry Wu, the chief geneticist, who could be seen as the film’s other villain.

There is some comic relief in the control room via Jake Johnson (New Girl) and Lauren Lapkus (Orange is the New Black) as frightened engineers, but very little of the film’s humor really takes hold.

JURASSIC WORLD is a fast paced ride, which will surely please hardcore fans of the franchise, and folks looking for a few hours of air-conditioning, but it’s just another pile of dinosaur shit, one that, at times, doesn’t look that different from last year’s GODZILLA reboot.

The monster mash-up that is the Indominus rex is just a much bigger T-rex, Pratt’s and Howard’s characters could have been played by anybody, and D’Onofrio's by-the-numbers bad guy is a crude bore (he's a much better villain on Netflix's Daredevil series).

And as much as composer Michael Giacchino cribs from John Williams’ original score to accompany sweeping shots of the island and theme park, that old Spielbergian sense of wonder just can’t quite be summoned.

I will say that the film does serve up a crowd pleasing climax, one that really roused the audience at the screening I attended, but that alone doesn’t elevate this tired material much.

That it took four screenwriters - Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Derek Connolly, and director Trevorrow - to come up with this supersized retread may the only genuinely shocking and hair-raising thing about it.

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Minor Marvel Characters Make Major Movie Debut

Now playing at a multiplex near you:

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

(Dir. James Gunn, 2014)

The latest offering from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, James Gunn’s GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, is for sure one of the funniest movies of the year.

Sure, it’s a big action-packed sci-fi spectacle, but for me, it was all about the laughs. And there are a lot of them, many coming from one-liners spouted by the lead, Chris Pratt (Parks and Recreation, ZERO DARK THIRTY), who carries the movie like a reigning comedy champ.

Funnier still, is Pratt’s co-star, an animated raccoon named Rocket voiced by Bradley Cooper, in maybe my favorite performance of his, who’s as much a master of weaponry as he is wisecracks, employing both in battle.

In this adaptation of a long running comic book series that I’ve been unaware of despite the fact it has been in existence since the year I was born (1969), Pratt plays Peter Quill, who we first meet as child in 1988 played by Wyatt Oleff witnessing his mother’s (Laura Haddock) death in the film’s opening moments. The young boy is abducted by aliens immediately afterwards, and we flash forward 26 years.

Pratt, identifying himself as a “junker,” flies around in his spaceship called “The Milano” scouring various planets for stuff to steal while listening to an old school tape compilation of ‘70s hits called “Awesome Mix. Vol. 1.”

From the dark, rocky terrain of a planet named Morag, Pratt obtains a mysterious orb (the movie’s McGuffin) which is sought for evil purposes by the villainous Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), who sends the green-skinned Gamora (Zoe Saldana, who was blue in AVATAR) to fetch it.

After Pratt tries unsuccessfully to sell the orb the much more stable planet Zander, Saldana steals it from him, but a couple of bounty hunters (the aforementioned raccoon, and a tree-like creature named Groot, voiced by Vin Diesel) get caught up in their chase/fight sequence mix.

The friction fraught foursome gets arrested by the Nova Corps, an intergalactic military/police force stationed on Zander, and run by Glenn Close as Nova Prime Irani Rael, with the always reliable John C. Reilly as one of her high-ranking officers.

From there, the thrown together team joined by Drax the Destroyer (WWE pro-wrestler Dave Bautista), who’s bent on taking revenge on Ronan to murdering his family, break out of imprisonment (in a hilarious chaotic set-piece to the tune of Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” and set about to keep the dangerously powerful orb away from the destructive devices of Ronan, and his boss Thanos (Josh Brolin), who you may remember from the stinger at the end of THE AVENGERS.


Also caught up in this crazy, uber colorful mayhem, is a blue-skinned Michael Rooker (HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, The Walking Dead) as the leader of the Ravagers, a rag tag posse of alien ruffians also after the orb. Rooker’s gravel voiced scenery chewing makes you believe that extreme racist redneck stereotypes will no doubt flourish in the depths of space and other dimensions.

Now, it may seem silly redundant to say that this Phase 2 Marvel movie has a STAR WARS-ian swagger to it, as every summer sci-fi/comic book contender draws upon the blueprint of George Lucas’ original 1977 space opera, but with this particular entry with its motley crew onboard a hunk of junk spaceship traveling to seedy ports thing a-goin’ on, I can't help going there.



Also, it has more than one Han Solo figure present in the rogue smartass bravado of both Pratt and Cooper, leaving Diesel’s Groot to be our Chewbacca stand-in. There’s a great running gag involving how Groot can only say “I am Groot,” and how each time (with different Diesel inflections), Cooper’s character can understand what he’s really saying, a sort of Han and Chewie-ish situation.



Bautista's Drax being able to only take things literally (“Nothing goes over my head! My reflexes are too fast. I will seize it.”) is another highly amusing thread.

The big ass CGI- saturated battle sequences were a bit too visually cluttered for my tastes at times, but the sheer amount of fun I had with what director Gunn and his co-screenwriter Nicole Perlman kept hurtling at me and the audience made that not matter so much.

Just like Pratt’s coveted cassette compilation is called, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is an awesome mix. It takes nifty sideline superheroes, only known to hardcore comic fans, and makes major stars out of them (it's also certainly a star-making part for Pratt). But more importantly it made me a laugh a lot, while it proved once again that the Marvel formula - Stan Lee cameo included – has a lot of life left in it.

And, of course, stay for the traditional post-credits scene, which, I won’t spoil, but I will say that it hints at the resurrection of an infamous Marvel character apparently still trapped in a world he never made. That probably is a bit of a spoiler, sorry.

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