‘Jurassic World Dominion’ Review: When Are We Going to Get to the Fireworks Factory?

Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World Dominion is instantly doomed by setting itself four years after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. With humans and dinosaurs having grown accustomed to living alongside each other, coming face to face with a velociraptor no longer seems to send the same shiver of fear down people’s spines. It should, however, still send one down audiences’ spines, but Trevorrow stages the film’s too-few dino-meets-human skirmishes with an impersonality that never inspires awe, only further worry for the soul of big-budget filmmaking now that chart-topping original movies are effectively extinct.

Dominion’s first major set piece, which occurs more than one hour into the film’s interminable runtime, suggests a sycophantic Universal intern’s elevator pitch come to life: “Jurassic Park meets No Time to Die!” As Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) zigs and zags via motorbike through the narrow streets of an Italian city toward his getaway plane, a bunch of raptors tirelessly give chase. The news-report-slash-info-dump that opens the film speaks to the “frightening new reality” of our world, but you wouldn’t know it from the way the extras from central casting seem almost resigned to their fates as the antipasto of the neo-Jurassic Age.

A programmatic submission to corporate responsibility, the sequence might have come to life had it evinced some self-awareness about how Owen and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) take down dinosaurs in ways that would make Marvel superheroes blush. Throughout, you may find yourself wishing for this franchise to give up on its stubborn insistence to tether us to a plausible reality and lean into the absurd and unexpected. The sight of, say, a nonna smacking a velociraptor across the face with freshly made ribbons of pasta is the sort of stupid fun that a Michael Bay film might have served up, but it’s also easy to see just about any filmmaker but Trevorrow staging the dead-serious moment where Owen’s bike wipes out the raptor that jumps onto the plane as a knowing riff on the classic Looney Tunes anvil gag.

No less unforgiving than Dominion’s artlessness is its cumbersome plot, which suggests a stitched-together pastiche of borrowed parts. Owen and Claire are now living somewhere in the new Wild West, trying to protect Maisie, a.k.a. Charlotte Lockwood 2.0 (Isabella Sermon), from Biosyn Genetics. Run by Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), Dennis Nedry’s contact in Jurassic Park, the company is your bog-standard representation of the sort of corporate evil that’s most successful at putting on a good PR face. If you’ve ever seen a movie in your life, it’s no spoiler to say that Dodgson is the digestivo on Dominion’s menu. As for the resignation in his face—spoiler alert!—it’s clearly recognizable as that of the actor playing him.

When mutant locusts start doing a number on America’s food supply chain, Maisie’s DNA becomes more precious than gold. This storyline suggests the plot to The Last of Us, except without Owen annihilating everyone who stands in between him and his surrogate daughter and sparing us from having to ponder the same permanent landscape of late capitalism presented across all 900 seasons of The Walking Dead. But the stink of franchise setup also hangs over it. Pity the future Sundance-winning filmmaker who will sell their soul to kick-start the next wave of Jurassic Park films, but the prospect of seeing human-locust hybrids laying waste to humanity is admittedly more attractive than anything imagined by Dominion.

There’s exactly one nifty sequence in the entirety of Trevorrow’s film, and it unfortunately doesn’t hinge on a velociraptor finally calling bullshit on Owen’s dino-whispering ways and filleting him to pieces. The sequence, more a moment, is simple but tensely staged: Claire ever so slowly slinking her way into a pond to evade a Willow Pill, one of the new dinosaurs introduced in Dominion. It’s possibly the closest that any of the Jurassic World films have come to channeling Steven Spielberg’s effortless and efficient gift for suspense.

Otherwise, when Dominion isn’t suffocating itself with world-building, much of it frustratingly untapped, it’s wholly given over to corny fan service. Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, and Sam Neill, the all-star trio of Jurassic Park, put on a frivolous nostalgia show, with Ian Malcom (Goldblum) serving up some old-school derring-do by throwing a torch into a Tyrannosaurus rex’s mouth and Ellie Sattler (Dern) and Alan Grant (Neill) awkwardly falling over each other as they try to swipe a locust from Dodgson’s clutches. And sprinkled throughout is Michael Giacchino’s recycling of John Williams’s famous Jurassic Park theme, barely working up a sweat and suggesting nothing so much as elevator music.

Within laboratories, exposition is mercilessly dumped on the audience’s ears. Outside of them, villains slink about like refugees from a low-rent Bond parody, and this before one of them at once laughably and perfectly uses a laser pointer to steer a raptor in Owen’s direction. Which raises the question: Why doesn’t everyone in this neo-Jurassic Age have a laser pointer? Because short of handing the reins back to Spielberg, a feature-length Jurassic Cat World is the only evolution that can rejuvenate a franchise long past its sell-by date.