Aficionados know that the second-best Jurassic Park film is Joe Johnson’s lean Jurassic Park III. Those same wise folk accept that this is not saying a great deal. JP III may also, after the original, be the only episode that comes close to qualifying as a good film.
All hail Gareth Edwards for returning the series to similar basics. Following up Colin Trevorrow’s truly ghastly Jurassic World: Dominion, the director of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Monsters treats us to a nimble, economic adventure that works some old-school Spielbergian spectacle in with tight action sequences. It is no masterpiece. But ‘good film’ belongs among its keywords.
The plot is mid-level dumb. Rupert Friend stars as a representative of big pharma tasked with extracting organic material from certain dinosaurs that may help in the production of life-saving drugs. People who have never seen a film before will enjoy speculating whether he’ll turn out to be more of a humanity-exploiting cad than he at first seems. Friend recruits the “covert operative” Scarlett Johansson to fire the guns, the palaeontologist Jonathan Bailey to do the brainwork and the rough-hewn Mahershala Ali to pilot the boat.
If you are a sucker for all those Howard Hawks films in which tough men and tougher women bring endless professionalism to daunting tasks then you will surely allow Jurassic World: Rebirth some leeway. The starry cast has great fun chewing through David Koepp’s adequate dialogue as they enter dank caves where no sane person would venture.
Jurassic World: Rebirth review – the plot is mid-level dumb but ‘good film’ belongs among its keywords
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The film progresses at a considerable clip, but Edwards, always at home to smoky visuals, finds at least one opportunity to remind us of the jaw-dropping wonder (remember Laura Dern’s jaw literally dropping?) that made the first film so memorable. Enormous herbivores court with intertwining necks as the party, pausing from white-water rafting and the evasion of flying carnivores, gaze on astonished.
Sadly, the film does give into many of the series’ later flaws. It works against the central premise – look how things were long ago – to include hypermutated dinosaurs that seem no more terrifying than your industry-standard tyrannosaurus. The final conflagration is all noise and chaos.
Jurassic World: Rebirth plays, nonetheless, as a refreshing blast of matinee exuberance after the pomposity of the previous three films. Yes, third best in the series. For whatever little that is worth.
In cinemas from Wednesday, July 2nd
