Growl snarl munch, it’s Burl! I’m here to review another in the
DVD Threequel series, which is to say third movies in a franchise which I’ve
never seen and am only catching up with because I own the DVD multipacks which
contain them! Poltergeist III was one
of these, and one of these days I suppose I’ll watch Robocop III as well!
This one is of course Jurassic
Park III, which Steven Spielberg did not direct! He turned the reins over
to former trick effects man Joe Johnston, and in all sorts of ways you can
really tell! Gone are the slow-building dinosaur approach suspense scenes, in
which their arrival is presaged by little ripples in a cup of water! This time
around there’s an ingested cell phone that could have been used for that
purpose, but Johnston muffs it! There’s also a scene which copycats the one in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in
which Indy’s friends, believing him to have gone over a cliff, gather at the
edge to look down, while Indy himself strolls up unseen and peers over to see
what they’re looking at! Ha ha, the version here involves Sam “In the Mouth of Madness” Neill, and it’s
done in such a perfunctory way that it barely registers as the rip-off scene it
intends to be! Ha ha!
The story begins with a parasailing mishap similar to the
one in Club Paradise! A teenage boy
crashes on Dinosaur Island, and his divorced parents, William H. “Fargo” Macy and Téa Leoni engage the
reluctant Dr. Neill and his youthful assistant to help look for him! Along for
the ride is Michael Jeter from The Money Pit and Drop Zone, and various
other mercenary types; none of them last long! Ha ha, dino chow! Anyway,
there’s a lot of pointless deception and equally pointless revelation packed
into the 90 minute production, and a good dose of ‘saurus action!
That’s the great benefit of this picture, relative to the
others in the series at least: it’s nasty and short in the best Hobbsian
tradition! It’s also extremely predictable, and in that sense feels more like a
theme ride than a movie! But it’s pleasantly tropical, which is why I watched
it – it’s pretty cold ‘round these parts, and sometimes a few palm fronds are
just what the paleontologist ordered, ha ha!
There’s not much else to say about the picture, really! The
cast is above average for this sort of thing, the kid is not as annoying as he
might have been, and the trick effects are unsurprisingly excellent! It’s a
decent, forgettable popcorn muncher, and I’ll give Jurassic Park III two stinky cell phones!
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