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Tell me if you've heard this one:
...Oh. Heard it already? Sorry. Well, how about this: There was this rabbi, see... ...And that about does it for my take on the third installment in the, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, increasingly irrelevant and worthless Jurassic Park franchise. Want more details? [Grumble] Weeeeelllllllllllll... All right. But donít say I didnít warn you. Where to begin? Oh, all right, at the beginning. Well, there's this island, y' see... Or more precisely, two (or more - hell, for all I know, they could make ten of these movies) islands, off the Costa Rican coast (try saying THAT ten times fast!), that this fictitious genetic company, InGen, used to sequence dinosaur DNA from some petrified amber... ...Oh, you've seen the first two films. Okay, then, fine, I'll start with the beginning of THIS movie- you really shoulda been more specific. ...That's okay. I get paid per-word. Anyway. Okay, well, there's this island, y'see... WAIT! I'm getting there! ...this island called Isla Sorna (not to be confused with the original film's setting, Isla Nublar), which looks like a really bad run of Scrabble tiles, but is actually "Site B" from the second movie, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. And there's this kid Eric (Trevor Morgan, from last year's The Patriot), who along with his good buddy Ben (Mark Harelik, the pedophiliac Algebra teacher in Election) decides to hire an opportunistic "thrill" company called, Dino-Soar to help him paraglide behind a speedboat just off the coast of the dino-isle. (Get it? Dino-...SOAR? Oh, the hilarity!) They figure to get some altitude, whip out the ol' camcorder, hook up with some breathtaking footage of various assorted Paleolithic beasties from a thousand feet, and go home and give Mom and Dad the bill for this INHERENTLY STUPID, FOOLHARDY venture. (My emphasis is there for a reason - this kind of thing becomes a recurring theme throughout JPIII. As we shall see.) Okay, so, something goes terribly, unpredictably wrong, of course (whoever would have known?) and the two intrepid Darwin Award candidates have to ditch their 'chute and land on the island. I won't go into details- let's just say that to a certain perspective, two guys dangling in mid-air off a towed line looks an awful lot like fishing. If you've seen the poster for this film, you know what I mean. Anyway. Cut to Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill, obviously still smarting, professionally, from the inexcusable Event Horizon), who's trying- rather unsuccessfully- to solicit interest, not to mention funding, in his ongoing paleontological fieldwork. (I mean, really, Doc, haven't you ever heard of S. R. Hadden?) No one wants to hear about the communications ability of raptors; they'd much rather argue about the airspeed velocity of African swallows, or even better, listen to Grant recount stories of his adventures among the dinos.
Grant's spinelessness is damn near laughable; ten minutes into the film, he's sternly intoning- into a microphone, no less - "No force on earth or heaven could get me on that island." Well, histrionics and self-preservation instinct notwithstanding, he whores up for a force only found in one of those realms: Moolah. (That's earth, by the way.) And joins up with the Kirbys, Billy, and three below-the-credits retainers (Michael Jeter, John Diehl, and Bruce A. Young) for a plane ride to Isla Sorna. Back to the Beach
Of course, it turns out that Grant, like actors Macy, Neill, and Leoni, was duped- roped in by a big paycheck to an inherently disastrous and nearly unbearably stupid situation. The plane lands on the island; its numbingly vacuous occupants realize this ain' the best idea, after all; they try to take off again; they fail. Along the way, a couple of the cast's less noteworthy luminaries get messily deaded. Nothing new here; but the film's less than half an hour old. We've got lots and lots of nothing new left to endure before we can go home and start really missing that eight bucks we spent on a ticket for JPIII.
It is also around this time that we learn that the intrepid, "enterprising" Kirby is nothing but a tub-and-tile guy: the script's biggest twist. Seriously. It also turns out that Paul and Amanda are separated, not that we really give a damn- they're both so unremittingly insipid and moronic, you don't care if they're served up individually, or as part of a complete entree. If only they'd polished off the Tea What more can I say, so as not to completely ruin the gentle filmgoer's Jurassic Park III moviegoing experience, by holding out even the slimmest prospect of hope that this two hours wonít be totally and irretrievably misspent? The dialogue out-and-out sucks. Various bits of canned tripe abound, such as: "We have to leave! We have to leave now." "He's alive. I know he's alive and we're gonna find him." "No matter how this turns out... It wasnít your fault." "It makes me wonder what else they [InGen] were up to." "You're alive... And that's the important thing." "I am so sorry that you have to be here." "I'm not." Well, screw you - I am. ...and so on. It's enough to make you wonder if the screenwriters didní't go on strike, after all... And if they didn't, maybe they damn well should have. It's as if someone decided to cobble together a script using Magnetic Poetry's Stupid Movie Dialogue Kit. As for characters... Tea Leoni's Amanda is quite possibly the most consistently annoying screen presence since Adam Sandler's Bobby Boucher (The Waterboy) - vapid, idiotic, unsympathetic, and, worst of all, maddeningly alive. She is a veritable fountain of stupidity: screaming damn near everybody's name at the loudest volume possible; running off into the deep woods without a care, a map, or a clue; picking up a telephone handset which hasn't had power since Clinton's first term; stubbornly avoiding being ground into hamburger by a bevy of increasingly sympathetic monsters. At some point, relatively early in the film, I actually began rooting for the dinos. I literally bent forward in my chair, pressed my fists into my cheeks, and chanted hopefully: "Eat her... Eat her," an incantation I honestly never expected to recite in polite company before now. (I won't reveal whether or not my wish came true; it would be cruel not to leave you with some hope.) No other characters stand out in the film enough to make an impression, which is in itself a pretty damning indictment. I mean, sure, it's just a Jurassic Park movie; but for crying out loud, if you waste Macy and Neill - not to mention a truly disingenuous cameo by Laura Dern as Grant's former flame, Ellie - you've got big, big problems. Watching these three above-par actors waste their time in JPIII is a little like watching Hoffman, DeNiro, and Spacey in a beer commercial.
Later, Paul the Plumber hits on another in a series of brilliant ideas: Let's "build something they can see from the air". Who? We already established, folks, Isla Sorna is a no-fly zone... No one calls him on it. They're all too busy trying to get Mandy to either shut the hell up, or else hurl herself, heroically, into the nearest gaping maw. Various cliches, fecund and feckless, are tossed about like monkey shit in the Baltimore Zoo's primate cage. The cast's lone black guy is a Snacky S'more by the end of the first reel. All kinds of useful supplies, ostensibly left behind on the island, abound- at one point, I wondered why the hell they didn't just stumble across a Wal-Mart, fully stocked, in the ruins of one of InGen's many Kennedyesque compounds. Two groups of people are seen running towards one another across an open prairie, arms extended, and the tracking shot swoops as the music swoons to a the-hills-are-alive-with-the-sound-of-allosauri crescendo (I kid you not). Grant, the group's alleged big-retainer dino-whisperer, ends up being rescued by someone who, as I'm certain the filmmakers insisted, the audience would "least expect". Blargh. The only thing surprising about any of this is that someone, somewhere actually thought this script was a pretty good idea. The foreshadowing, as mentioned earlier, is as heavy and ponderous as Roseanne vs. Ghidorah. It turns out that raptors are smart - much, much smarter, in fact, than the witless Isla Sorna castaways, or, one suspects, the filmmakers. They (the raptors, not anyone in any way related to this production) can communicate at an astonishingly advanced level. They can set traps, lay ambushes, and think "three-dimensionally", something even the great Khan Noonien Singh - another unpredictably deadly result of late-Twentieth-Century genetic engineering - never got the hang of. The luckless, brainless, thoughtless, hopeless humans on Isla Sorna repeatedly insist on putting themselves in truly retarded situations. "Into the herd!" "Into the trees!" "Into its mouth!" It doesn't matter where they run, where they stumble, where they meander, really- theyíre bound to screw up, regardless, and eventually you just get tired of watching them run this way and run that way, stupidly, fitfully, incessantly. You know how cats will watch an already-winged mouse or a moth or a cricket flitter about for a while, and then finally get bored and either eat the damned thing, or sit on it, or something? That's what watching JPIII is like. If they'd only stop scampering about, maybe we could all enjoy a really good snack. Suddenly, Fat Bastard is a pretty sympathetic character: "Get - in - mah ' belly!" [Sigh] If only it were that simple. Missed opportunities Meanwhile, amid all this anti-MENSA activity, at least one really, really interesting, potential plot line went embarrassingly, inexcusably undeveloped. About midway through the film, the raptors do something remarkable- they impale one unlucky bastard, but let him live. Then they scamper off into the jungle, and the other survivors gradually approach their fallen comrade. Of course, this is one of the film's many vaunted "raptor traps", but here's the really astonishing thing: after the trap fails to net any new delicacies, the raptors snap the wounded guy's neck. Note: They don't eat him alive (and as we all know, raptors prefer their meat pulsing). Which means- they weren't really hungry. Ergo, they, unlike 99.9% of the other carnivores on this planet, weren't hunting the humans for food. (At least, not at that moment.) They were hunting the humans- for sport. Note something else about that scenario, too: When the trap fails, they don't let the unfortunate human suffer. They snap his neck. Quick- and painless. Why would a raptor choose to eliminate one of its prey using such an arcane method? Why not just rip him to shreds with those badass claws? Or, if the human wasn't to be used as food at that moment, why not simply move on and let him expire at his own speed? There can be only one explanation- raptors are not only smart enough to set traps and choreograph ambushes and figure out how to operate simple machinery: THEY ARE SMART ENOUGH TO PERCEIVE PAIN IN OTHER ANIMALS, AND TO EXHIBIT MERCY WHEN THEY SO CHOOSE... THIS was the ONLY compelling element in the entire film, in my opinion. And it went by without commentary, without reference, without any follow-up of any kind. This is a criminally tragic oversight; someone ought to be shot. Everything else in JPIII is just a big-budget Keystone Kops skit; Benny Hill meets One Million Years B.C. There are a couple of decent lines in JPIII, but both of them might well be referring to situations other than those they are ostensibly intended for. About midway through JPIII, the film's Newt-analogue character (I mean, is every film this summer gonna rip off Aliens?) informs Grant: "I read both of your books. I liked the first one a lot more." A sideswipe at Crichton? Maybe. Then, in the very next breath, the Newtonian Plot Device pipes up that another guy's book was overly"preachy, with too much chaos". Newt-Too might well have been describing any of the JP films. But that's not all How much more do you really want to know? Situational absurdities abound. When the big, bad dinos- whose only motivation, like many of the rest of us, is to find a decent buffet and maybe a ballgame- manage to corral just about all the remaining humans in a tight little noose, it's Costa Rica's newest superhero, to the rescue! Ta-da-ta-TA-ta-TA!! Tub'n'TileMan figures that he, alone, can prove a worthy distraction to the beasties, convincing them that a scrawny little chicken wing like himself is more attractive than an already-served four-course meal. This is- altogether now- another INHERENTLY STUPID, FOOLHARDY venture. (And it works- proving that dinos maybe ain't so bright, either.) A neat little bit with a satellite phone provides some intentional comic relief- the ever-more-popular alpha male call to arms, "You can have my cell phone when you pry it from my cold, dead hand," has never seemed more, well, appropriate. Except for the "cold" part... Never mind. At one point, the mobile phone- an incredibly integral plot device; could this film have been made fifteen years ago, I wonder? - rings, only to turn out to be a recording for a time-share opportunity. Suddenly, a T. Rex crashes the party, and all seems lost- until the inexplicably disinterested nasty abruptly turns tail and runs in the other direction - FAST. I feel his pain. Even on Dino Island, apparently, nothing annoys quite like telemarketers, especially at dinner time. The embattled group of heroic morons barely manage to escape being unceremoniously smooshed by a spinosaurus, when, amazingly, the oversized iguana bursts through this 60' tall, concrete-and-steel reinforced fence. (Similar to the first two installments'.) I mean, he just outright flattens the sucker, like Delta Burke tackling a turkey leg kiosk. Now, witnessing this truly impressive, spectacular feat of strength and determination, WHAT DO OUR BELOVED ADVENTURERS DO? Why, they run into a hut. And bolt the door. Later, Grant manages to temporarily stun a pteradon with a well-placed round kick, one-upping Jackie Chan for the Most Ridiculous Martial Arts Move of All Time. Finally, JPIII's trite "resolution" is so over-the-top impossible and silly-assed, I won't even dignify it with a description. But by this time in the film, to be honest, you've probably been bludgeoned into such a soporific stupor, that it doesn't matter anymore. Virtually anything would be preferable to any continuation of the drama; at the theater I saw JPIII at, by the film's climactic stupidity, the variously dazed, bewildered, and mystified dug in their assorted pockets and purses for aspirin, bourbon, or chloroform. "There are two types of boys," muses Grant, sagely, as he eyes a flask of T. Rex pee (again- I kid you not): "those that want to be astronomers, and those that want to be astronauts." All fine and good, Professor, but add a third category:"Those that want to hurl that dino pee at the screen." So now... Let's get technical What about the special effects? You ask. After all, Cromack's an fx junkie, he had to like those, right? And the answer is, Yeah, sure. The digital effects were fine. ...That's it? Just "fine"? ...Yep. They were good. Not"great"? Not "spectacular"? Not "unprecedented"? Whassamatta, you lose your thesaurus? Nope. Look, there's really nothing new in JPIII. I mean, sure, we've got the spinys, but they're not "spectacular", just "different". Something to act as a counterpoint to the T. Rex, and stir up the pot a bit. This they do, very effectively: They're big, they're scary, they've got more teeth than Farrah Fawcett. The compy's make a belated entrance to the franchise, but theyíre just like Crichton's original novel described: chicken-sized lizard-ducks, nice enough a l'orange but not terribly intimidating on film.
The film's sound effects are outstanding; which is to say, VERY, VERY LOUD. Shelly Johnson's cinematography (previous credits include 1991's classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze) is appropriate: raw and dynamic for those in-your-face fight scenes, more sedate and respectful for the wide-angle panoramic shots. It's all very nice, which is to say, nothing special. Wrapping it all up... This is clearly the weakest entry in director Joe Johnston's otherwise laudable career- the guy who helmed family-friendly fare like: The Rocketeer, Jumanji, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and the sensational October Sky, has taken a clear and disconcerting turn to the vapid and eminently pointless with this second Jurassic Park sequel. (Johnston also designed The Iron Giant.) A protege of both George Lucas and executive producer Steven Spielberg, he clearly has the chops, but needs to pull himself out of this hole, and fast. It's a little unnerving that he doesn't have anything else lined up right now - one hopes his entire career isn't riding on the success or failure of JPIII. JPIII should add fuel to the growing criticism, that Hollywood needs more than boffo special effects and a brand-name pedigree to make a truly worthwhile film. (Sounds like just plain ol' common sense, doesn't it?) Without a compelling script, characters, or originality to rely on, Jurassic Park III sinks deep into the ever-more-familiar quagmire of cinematic superficiality and irrelevancy. But it might still do decent box office; even though it's being released relatively late in the season for a potential summer blockbuster, it has the Spielberg pedigree, and its two predecessors- 1993's Jurassic Park, and 1997's The Lost World: Jurassic Park - raked in a combined $1.534 BILLION worldwide. JPIII's reported $93M budget ($20M higher than Lost World; $30M more than the original film) should come back inside of three weeks in release, especially since its only genuine competition for the next month comes from only three new releases: the romantic comedy America's Sweethearts (July 20); Fox's beleaguered Planet of the Apes redux (July 27); and the potential mega-hit Rush Hour 2 (August 3). Other than those, the scopes are clean until September; it would not be a great surprise to see JPIII mop up the box office to the tune of $150M or even $175M before its original run is through. In conclusion: I think the sad, silly, inconsequential story of Jurassic Park III is best summed up by a quote, from the film itself: "Where do you think theyíre going?" ...An excellent question. It should have been posed much, much earlier in the development of JPIII.
Rick's Ratings: Jurassic Park III (2001; Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment). Starring: Sam Neill; William H. Macy; Tea Leoni; Alessandro Nivola. Directed by Joe Johnston. Cheese factor: 9 out of a possible 10 hunks of Limburger (my God, where do I begin? The dialogue. Too many happy coincidences and overly obvious, clumsily executed foreshadowing. Hell... everything.) Pucker factor: 8 out of a possible 10 grimacing Yodas (too many implausibilities and sheer idiocy in the plot to catalogue.) Geek factor: 7 out of a possible 10 laughing Skolnicks (hey, it's a film about genetic engineering, dinosaurs, and the chick from Deep Impact. It's not a total wash.) Chick factor: 3 out of a possible 10 jiggling J.Lo's (I donít get the whole Tea Leoni thing, I admit it- she may do all right with comedy, but every time I see her in a "serious" film, she constantly looks like someone just cut a loud fart. She's all right, I guess, if you like that Eastern-European-pouty-peasant look.) Bruckheimer factor: 4 out of a possible 10 boo-yah explosions (people. Dinosaurs. Lunch. [Yaaaawwwwwwwwwn].)
Rankin' Rick gives Jurassic Park III 3.5 out of a possible 10 popcorn tubs. Go see it at a matinee, if you see it at all. Otherwise, wait for availability on satellite or cable in about a year or so. It's not even really worth a rental, honestly. Jurassic Park III is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for violence and "intense sci-fi terror". Whatever. If you want to keep the kiddies away from this film, be my guest- they'll appreciate you more for keeping them from spending their hard-earned allowance on a total piece of crap, than for any other reason.
Trailer Gossip : Trailers running in front of JPIII include the new Collateral Damage trailer-Arnie's latest starring vehicle is a cross between Patriot Games, The Siege and Commando, and pits Conan the Republican against an international terrorist from Columbia. (He must not like Starbucks.) Ití's primed for an October release. Others: the excellent Spider-Man teaser; The Musketeer; Bubble Boy, which looks promising; and Nicholas Cage's latest yawn-fest, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which looks to be a cross between In Love and War and A Walk in the Clouds, starring the would-be Superman as an officer in fascist Italy's army. Oooooohhhhhhh-kaaaaayyyyyyy. Maybe it's not to late to sign up for Leaving Las Vegas 2: Return to Reno. . |
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Ostensibly rich,
terribly misguided white guy somehow, against all
logic and self-preservation instincts, prevails upon a group
of variously employed folks to visit some of the most dangerous
real estate in the world - no, not South Central Los Angeles
or downtown Seattle, in the midst of a World Trade
Organization summit- but an island off the coast of Costa Rica
which is home to countless genetically manipulated dinosaurs.
Yeah, some of them are cute an' cuddly, no threat to humans at
all, of course, in spite of the fact that they weigh as much
as a modern fast-attack submarine. But others are faster, meaner,
and have teeth that make your set of $29.95 Ginsu steak knives
look like your kidís construction-paper scissors. Against
all odds, since the expedition was so well conceived
and planned and all, the hapless tourists become stranded
on the island, minus any working communications gear, and must
fight to survive against the resident beasties, who are really
pissed that these idiots showed up without so much as a travel
reservation. Along the way, they discover that the island's former
owners, a bunch of brilliant but monstrously dense folks who
ran a company called InGen, weren't all that forthcoming, moral,
or bright! Some die, some live, some prove through
their actions that although humans may technically
be the current masters of the planet, clearly, intelligence didn't
play much of a factor there. And the final frame of the film
leaves the story wide open for a sequel, since
the world is apparently full of idiots who'll risk
being eaten alive to witness, firsthand, the brutally self-destructive
stupidity of human nature.
Grant is ably assisted by his
junior paleontologist, Billy (Alessandro Nivola,
the simpering, insectile Pollux in Face/Off), who
manages to blindside his boss into a dinner meeting with the
Kirbys: Amanda (Tea Leoni) and Paul
(the usually superb William H. Macy). Paul's an "import
/ export" guy, which is filmspeak for: "We donít
really know what the hell he does, but he sure
has a lot of money". He tells Grant that he and Amanda are
wanting to do something really cool for
their honeymoon, since they've already done all the typical,
boring, predictable tourist crap, like climb K2 and dive in the
Marianas and roll winos in Central Park for their pocket change.
He and Mandy want to do an overflight of Isla Sorna - like dinosaur-deficient
Iraq, a "no-fly zone" - at low altitude, and "I've
got the connections in the Costa Rican government, so I can make
that happen." Riiiiiiight. So why are they eating at Gilley's?
Never mind. Anyway, Paul offers to cut Grant a Kirby Enterprises
check right there and then, to subsidize his research for the
next umpteen years, just for the pleasure of his company on,
what you just know will turn out to be, an INHERENTLY
STUPID, FOOLHARDY venture.
Foreshadowing
is everywhere, obvious and stilted."Raptors were fierce,
intelligent, and socially superior," intones Grant, who
apparently has never been introduced to any Dallas socialites.
One of the Kirby-dudes assures his boss, nonchalantly, "It's
gonna be a walk in the park." Billy waxes poetic about his
"lucky bag", an Eastpak that once "saved my life".
It's all ludicrously heavy-handed and annoying; you get the feeling
that career overachievers like Macy wished they'd been cast as
one of JPIII's very transparently expendable hirelings,
instead of a major character- at least then, he wouldn't have
to choke out too much dipshit dialogue before he got mercifully
eaten. About the only truly forgivable fragment of conversation
from the entire first hour is Grant's quipped, "Survival
of the most idiotic". Brother, you said a mouthful there.
Once the variously
shaken, rattled, and rolled survivors manage to escape the wreckage
of their increasingly biodegradable aircraft- not to mention
the clutches of the island's newest attraction, the incredibly
fearsome spinosaurus (an uncredited Dr. Laura Schlessinger)-
their true purpose on the island is revealed: to "rescue"
Paul and Amanda's son, Eric, who's been missing for nearly two
months. (Surprise! Like we couldnít see that coming.)
How they're going to accomplish this, however, is a bit of a
mystery: Amanda seems to think that yelling out her son's name
through a megaphone, for instance, is a perfectly sane idea,
while everyone else decides they'd be better off just following
Grant. After awhile, they realize that backup might be a good
thing, so they try Kirby's cell phone. Unfortunately, either
there is a dearth of microwave transmission relays on the abandoned-for-the-last-decade
island, or else Kirby's Sprint PCS is every bit as much a piece
of crap as mine.
Macy's
character, by the way, isn't much of a braniac, either: Less
than sixty seconds after Amanda figured out that she wasn't holding
a sound-powered telephone, Kirby tries to empty a pocketful of
change into a similarly unplugged vending machine. What the hell
are these morons doing on Isla Sorna? They'd be lucky not to
meet their doom in a 7-Eleven. And Billy's no Einstein, either.
The
action scenes are handled deftly and economically; digital images
blend seamlessly with Stan Winston's always-excellent creature
rigs. Tight, claustrophobic fight scenes between humans and raptors
are pounded out with familiar teeth-grinding suspense. Large-scale
vistas of dino herbivores commingling together on vast prairies
are mellow and attractive. However- sorry, but we've seen it
all before. The only really, compellingly "new" thing
to speak of, should have been the film's penultimate surprise,
and may have partially redeemed an otherwise devastatingly mediocre
film. But, the marketing geniuses at Universal / Amblin decided
to plaster their shadowy outline across every JPIII
poster in North America, so when they finally show up- appearing
like Boris Karloff out of the stereotypical fog- it's not even
very interesting. The audience's reaction to their introduction
is akin to that provoked by the arrival of a consistently tardy
relative: "Oh, good, he's finally got here." Hardly
the sort of armrest-gripping development we have come to expect
from this kind of film.
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