Tag Archives: Chris Pratt

Jurassic World Dominion

10 Jun

‘Jurassic World Dominion’: Ending on overdrive for a series makers could have just left in ‘Park’

By Tom Meek Friday, June 10, 2022

The “Jurassic Park” films all possessed that classic Spielberg wonderment propelled and embossed by a trumpeting John Williams score, and the 2015 “Jurassic World” reboot by Colin Trevorrow, who made the small indie feature “Safety Not Guaranteed” (2012), had some decent rootings to it. The latest dino theme park installment, “Jurassic World Dominion” (also directed by Trevorrow), tries to do too much with too little. It’s not so much that it’s too long – okay, at two and a half hours, it is – but that it tries to blend the two franchises (“Park” and “World” now each having three chapters) and weave them into an unnecessarily complex plot that has world-hopping aspirations as well as deep-creviced conspiracies. It borrows too much from other films without digging new dirt; we get cool new CGI dinos to gawk at, but little else.

The franchise crossover seems to be a thing these days. Last year’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home” not only dragged in a potpourri of MCU denizens but also the previous two incarnations of Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire popping up alongside reigning Spidey Tom Holland) due to a Doctor Strange-triggered multiverse. Here it’s not that complicated or far-fetched – at first. The world is now shared with dinosaurs, which were taken off the Costa Rican island in the previous “World” movie, “Fallen Kingdom” and got loose. If you’re trawling for crab in Alaska, you might bring up a mosasaur that will flip your ship and take your catch; if you’re in the high Sierras, be careful walking about, because there’s velociraptors in the woods. Every now and then a human gets gobbled, there’s an exotic dino market in the bowels of the Maltese capital of Valletta (feeling a lot like the bar scene from “Star Wars”) and a concerted global effort to relocate dinos to sanctuary reserves. More menacing are the 3-foot locusts with cretaceous DNA that eat up nearly every farm crop not sowed with Biosyn Corp.-engineered seeds. Yup, avarice, god complexes and long, dubious corporate agendas play big, as do spy games and old flames.

Raptor wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his betrothed, the former Costa Rican park manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) live in those Sierra with Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), who at the end of “Fallen Kingdom” was revealed to be the first human clone. Also in those woods is ol’ raptor Blue, which Owen raised at the theme park. Blue has reproduced without mating, and her offspring and Maisie are wanted by Biosyn for their DNA. Meanwhile, Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), last seen in 2001’s “Jurassic World III,” gets dragged in to look at the locust problem and enlists the help of paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), her former flame. (She got married and had kids, he didn’t.) Chaos theory mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) just happens to be working for Biosyn on a short-term contract.

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The Lego Movie 2

10 Feb

‘The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part’: Sequel an expansion kit lacking that satisfying click

 

By Tom Meek 

Image result for lego movie 2

The pieces are all there, but they all don’t snap together like last time. The 2014 “The Lego Movie” was so sharp and fresh, full of wit that appealed to young and old, marvelous movie references and a world reimagined in a way no one thought possible – even a Lego sea. It was “Toy Story,” but revolutionary in vision, style and delivery.

The director-writer tandem of “The Lego Movie,” Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (they were most recently involved penning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”), remain part of the writing crew for “The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part,” but Mike Mitchell has taken the director’s seat. We’d left Emmett (Chris Pratt) and sassy love interest Lucy, with the saucy moniker of Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), in a Lego utopia; it is now a wasteland evocative of “The Planet of the Apes,” with a half-crumbled Statue of Liberty at the center and a “Mad Max” barrenness all around. Alien Lego beings have come and blasted the happiness all to hell. There’s malaise and a small oasis and things seem to be getting slowly put back together, until Lucy and a few others are abducted by Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi, a shape-shifting, duplicitously motormouthed charm-arella voiced by Tiffany Haddish. Emmett, finding his inner hero, turns his happy home into a spaceship and sets off to save his crew. 

That inner can-do actually manifests itself physically, in the form of Rex Dangervest (Pratt pulling double duty), a rough-and-tumble space traveler who pulls Emmett from certain destruction amid a meteor field and signs on for the “Star Wars”-like quest to rescue the princess from the impregnable palace – refer to Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress” for origins and blueprint. Pratt’s Rex, spoofing on Pratt’s dino wrangler from the “Jurassic World” flicks, helms a spaceship crewed by communicative raptors. It’s funny for a second. As is much of the rest of the film. The gritty irreverence and punchiness of the last film is greatly diminished, though, feeling snapped on and borrowing heavily from the “Toy Story” plot device of toy owner Andy getting on in years. Getting old is hard on toys and plastic bricks, as well as on humans. 

As with the last “Lego” film, the funny centerpiece is the growling, constipated-sounding Batman (Will Arnett). In a cheeky sendup, there’s a run-through of all the actors that played The Bat onscreen, from Michael Keaton to Christian Bale (homeboy Ben Affleck is in there too). There’s just not enough of that good stuff to make part two stick the way the first one did. The animation is just as visually stunning, but in the end it’s just pieces of its former self.

Don’t get me wrong, “The Lego Movie 2” is a great way for kids to pass a cold winter day, but adults won’t be grinning cheek to cheek the way they did back in ’14.

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