Jurassic Park 3 Review
By Joe Lozito
"Park" Lacks Bite
There must be something ironic about all the attention that is paid to the realistic look of the dinosaurs in the "Jurassic Park" series while the plots of these films seem like after-thoughts. In the third installment, mere minutes after proclaiming "no force on heaven or earth will get me back on that island", Dr. Alan Grant (the steadfast Sam Neill, reprising his role from JP1) is back on that island. In reality (if I can call it that) he's on the island from JP2 which - as any 12 year-old will tell you - is actually "Site B", the island on which the Ingen Corporation tested before populating "Site A" from JP1. Whatever.
What brings Dr. Grant, looking more and more like Indiana Jones with each tilt of his hat, to Isla Sorna is best left unsaid - not that any surprises would be ruined, it's just too stupid. Suffice it to say that a mother (Tea Leoni) let her young son (Trevor Morgan) go parasailing off the coast of the most dangerous island on Earth with her boyfriend. As you can imagine...it doesn't go well.
Anyway, enter Dr. Grant and a menagerie of dinosaurs that look just as good as they did in Steven Spielberg's 1993 original. Mr. Spielberg declined to direct this sequel, throwing the reins to Joe Johnston who is familiar with computer-generated beasties from helming "Jumanji". Mr. Johnston and writers Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor ("Election") craft 90 minutes of straight humans-chased-by-dinosaurs action. There is very little plot, let alone subplot, in the film. But unfortunately, what there is - a "Parent Trap"-style reconciliation between Ms. Leoni's Amanda and William H. Macy's Paul - is as stale as T. Rex's breath.
Speaking of the big T, he's been one-upped in this film by the newly-discovered Spinosaurus (apparently, the folks at Ingen discovered this species years before the archeologists). There is an impressive fight between the towering twosome, in a long-awaited homage to "King Kong". Another new species in the franchise is the Pteradon. Cut from the earlier films, apparently because the technology wasn't mature enough yet, this flying species gives the film one of its few real highlights as the characters are attacked from above.
Of course, the famous Velociraptors still play a role in the film, but the script is so eager to make them intelligent, that the raptors are no longer scary. Instead of charging and chomping as they did in the previous films, they have meetings and discuss (thankfully without subtitles) their next move. This makes for a surprisingly anti-climactic ending.
The film, however, knows exactly what it has set out to do, and it attacks its job with gusto. Mr. Johnston keeps the action and one-liners coming and, before you know it, it's over. Also, since the film needed to be PG-13 for the kids, the violence is kept to a minimum. Thankfully, the writers have sidestepped the mistake of the first two films: having an evil human as the villain. The characters are united in their goal of escaping the island and, refreshingly, they have no plan whatsoever. The film itself, however, clearly does. The final shots are the most blatant sequel set-up in years.
