Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdon review – 'It’s time this dino-bore franchise became extinct'
Summary
Desperate to save them from the eruptive volcano about to ravage Isla Nublar, she recruits two young colleagues — fearless paleo-veterinarian Zia (Daniella Pineda) and tremulous tech nerd Franklin (Justice Smith) — before enticing Owen out of cabin-building rural retirement. What they don’t realise as they reach the island is that they are dupes for baddies plotting to flog the rescued dinosaurs to the sort of billionaire thrill-seekers to whom conventional beasts became offputtingly common at about the time Mike Tyson’s pet tiger went missing in The Hangover. Sadly, that heart is failing, and he is too sick to notice that his unctuous CEO Eli Mills (Rafe Spall) has converted the colossal gothic mansion Lockwood shares with cute grandaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) into a dinosaur holding pen/auction house. You could just about overlook the dismally hackneyed script, failure to create tension and such casual sloppiness as auctioneer Gunnar Eversol (Toby Jones, a great actor wasted here) letting a raptor go for a few million when any demented plutocrat would pay 20 times that, if it wasn’t for the lack of humour. Personally, I’d stick that idea in the bin and plump for a Dorset-set comedy of manners entitled Jurassic Coast, in which the Indoraptor teams up with a stegosaurus and a couple of triceratops to open a mock-Victorian tea room overlooking the cobb at Lyme Regis.