Review: Jurassic Park 3 Is Just Plain Old Bad
- Jun 16, 2018
- 2 min read
There are bad sequels, there are dumb sequels and there are needless sequels. And then there's Jurassic Park 3.
Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill) is approached by Paul and Amanda Kirby (William H. Macy & Tea Leoni) with an offer. They want to do a fly over of Site B, and wish for Dr Grant to be a guide of sorts. However, things are not as they seem. The Kirby's son, Erik (Trevor Morgan), found himself trapped on the island during a parachuting trip gone wrong, and his parents intend to find, despite how thoroughly annoying he is, and also how dangerous those pesky dinosaurs are.
This movie. This damnable movie. While Jurassic Park combined wonder and terror in a near perfect combination, and The Lost World offered a mixed but generally entertaining bag, 3 acts as little more than a T-Rex sized middle finger to the franchise, and it seems intentional. When it's not killing of the most recognizable dinosaur, rewriting characters or turning velociraptors into god knows what, it's just being a badly written, poorly acted, totally irredeemable piece of cinema that never should have been made.
The characters are morons, even by Jurassic standards, screaming and shouting almost always, arguing amongst each other, travelling to a monster infested island totally unprepared, assuming that kidnapping the resident expert is the best way to go about things, the list goes on. No one is particularly likable either, be it through just being terrible people or, in Dr Grant's case, clearly not wanting to be there.
Not even the dinosaurs can save this movie. The effects are worse, the newly introduced spinosaurus isn't half as intimidating or exciting as the T-Rex and the strangely redesigned raptors act more like a flock of mildly aggravated parrots than the vicious killing machines of the past.
Jurassic Park 3 is, plain and simple, a bad movie. It's everything you don't want from a sequel and more, to the point that, for over a decade, it killed the franchise. Don't waste your time.
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